AS THE UNITED STATES goes to the poll, main candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not the only ones biting their nails.
Very few people know Ronald L. Rowe Jr., who is arguably the most worried man in Washington, DC. Rowe is acting director of the Secret Service, which is tasked with protecting presidential candidates, among others. Rowe knows something that most Americans are blissfully unaware of—that a dead man can legally be elected president should another attempt on Trump’s life succeed before voting day.
In India, an election is countermanded if a candidate dies during the campaign. The US constitution is irrevocable that the president should be chosen on “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years.” The election has to take place even if one of the candidates is dead. And if the dead candidate garners 270 votes in the electoral college, he or she will be the president-elect.
The responsibility of preventing such a catastrophe rests on the Secret Service, which was entrusted with the task after the assassination of president William McKinley in 1901. Rowe wore the crown of thorns three months ago, after an assassination attempt on Trump nearly succeeded. That attempt cost Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle her job. The monumental failure of one of America’s elite agencies to protect the Republican candidate endangered “the fundamentals of our government itself”, an independent panel appointed by President Joe Biden said in its report. Janet Napolitano, who was homeland security secretary in the Obama administration, was hinting precisely at the bizarre possibility of a dead person becoming president-elect when she released the panel’s report. After Rowe replaced Cheatle, there have been two more attempts on Trump’s life.
The first time I encountered a dead candidate who had won an election in the US was in Missouri. In 2000, Missouri governor Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash three weeks before voting day. The popular Democrat was seeking a seat in the US senate. Carnahan posthumously defeated his Republican opponent and sitting senator John Ashcroft in that election. Carnahan’s widow, Jean, took the senate seat that her husband won under Missouri laws, which authorised the governor to make the appointment.
As a foreign correspondent in the US, I closely followed the 2002 re-election campaign of Congresswoman Patsy Mink of Hawaii because she was the first Asian-American woman to be elected to the US house of representatives. Of Japanese origin, Mink, 74, died of pneumonia five weeks before voting day. She remained on the ballot and was posthumously elected. In Pennsylvania in 2008, in California in 2010 and in Texas in 2012, I reported the victories of candidates, who had died in accidents or illness, to their respective states’ senate. Some states have begun changing their laws to replace dead candidates on the ballot by voting day. But it is easier said than done given the present-day polarisation in US politics.
Should the unthinkable happen, there are eight states where the death of a major candidate will make no difference. The names of presidential candidates are on the ballot papers only in 42 states. The rest will directly elect their members of the electoral college to formally choose the next president on December 17. All this conundrum is because the US presidential election is actually 50 elections in the constituent states under local statutes. The outcomes are then fused into a presidential choice via the electoral college and certified at a joint session of the Congress.
The author is a senior journalist.