Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

From the November 4 issue of the Washington Post:

David Andahl died of covid-19 in early October, just as the coronavirus was pummeling his home state of North Dakota.  But that did not keep the 55-year-old rancher from winning his race for the state House of Representatives on Tuesday. . . .

Posthumous victories like Andahl’s are rare in the United States, though not entirely unprecedented.  Since 2000, at least six dead candidates have won elections at nearly every level of government, from mayoral races in small-town Tennessee to a U.S. Senate seat.

Most recently, Dennis Hof, a brothel owner and reality TV star, won a seat in the Nevada state legislature in 2018.  About three weeks before his victory, Hof was found dead at his Love Ranch brothel outside Las Vegas.

(At least Dennis Hof – like Nelson Rockefeller – died happy.)

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This year, voting began at least 30 days before election day in Alabama, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.

So if David Andahl had been running for office in any of those states instead North Dakota, a number of voters – perhaps a significant number – might have cast their ballots for him before he died.

Since early voting didn’t begin in North Dakota until October 19 – some time after Andahl’s death – we can assume that everyone who voted for him on November 3 either (1) was not aware that he had died a month earlier, or (2) decided it was better to vote for a dead Andahl than one of his live opponents.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve voted in a number of elections where a dead candidate would have been preferable to the live doofuses who were listed on the ballot.

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Imagine if the Baseball Writers Association of America allowed early voting for the annual Most Valuable Player awards.  In other words, imagine that MVP voters were allowed to make their picks over Labor Day weekend rather than waiting until all the games had been played and the season was over.

That’s a pretty stupid idea, right?  After all, what happens in the last few weeks of a season is likely to be very significant when it comes to choosing an MVP.  It only makes sense for all the voters to cast their ballots after the season is over, when they have access to the full-season statistics that are relevant to a decision.

But we do things differently in presidential elections – which are certainly more important than Most Valuable Player votes.  

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Early voting bothers me.  

Not because it makes it a easier to engage in voter fraud – which it does, of course (at least on a small scale) – but because I feel like it just makes sense for everyone to be voting at the same time . . . like baseball MVP voters.

If you vote two weeks, or four weeks, or even longer before the election, what if some crazy sh*t happens between the day you cast your ballot and election day?  For example, let’s say – I’m speaking hypothetically, of course! – that one of the candidates comes down with a life-threatening medical condition on, say, October 2.

What if you had voted on October 1, or even earlier?  Maybe you’d be happy with your vote regardless because you would have voted for your candidate even if Jesus Christ himself was running against him.

But maybe you would have voted differently if you had waited until later.  

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What if your candidate ended up kicking the bucket before election day – like the unfortunate David Andahl?   

It’s likely that the dead candidate’s party would replace him or her with its vice-presidential nominee.  But the party could decide to name someone else – someone who wasn’t on the ballot at all.

If you had voted early for the dead candidate, maybe you’d be happy with the vice-presidential nominee (or a different replacement) taking the dead candidate’s place. But maybe you wouldn’t – maybe you would have voted for the other party’s nominee  instead.  

I have a feeling that if John McCain had died before the 2008 election and been replaced by Sarah Palin, the Democrats would have gotten a lot more votes.

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I admit that the odds of a presidential candidate dying a few weeks before an election are pretty slim.

But it wouldn’t be at all surprising if something happened after early voting had started that caused a large number of early voters to wish they had waited.  

Maybe a candidate says or does something really stupid a week or two before the election.  (That would be a real shocker . . . NOT!)

Or maybe a drug company announces that its brand-new covid-19 vaccine was 90% effective a week before the 2020 election instead of a week after that election?  

Given that tens of millions of Americans voted early – and given that most of those early voters would have voted for a convicted serial murderer over Trump – it’s possible that an earlier announcement of the news about the vaccine wouldn’t have mattered.

But if everyone had had to wait until November 3 to vote, it’s certainly possible that a pre-election day  announcement that an effective vaccine was just around the corner would have altered the outcome of the presidential vote.  

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There are plenty of examples of presidential elections being won or lost thanks to events that occurred shortly before election day.

For example, only eleven days before the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comes infamously sent a letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.  (Comey later said that he expected Clinton to win the election, and thought that if he held back on his announcement until after the election, people would accuse him of covering up on her behalf – which would have delegitimized her election from the very beginning.)

What if early voting had been as widespread in 2016 as it was in 2020?  Would that have significantly mitigated the impact of Comey’s action?  I think it almost certainly would have – perhaps Mrs. Clinton would have won despite Comey’s announcement.

(Speaking of e-mails and elections, wasn’t there some kerfuffle about somebody’s e-mails that came out a few days before Election Day 2020 – which was after millions of Americans had already voted?)

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The problems caused by early voting would be mitigated if early voters could change their minds after casting a ballot.  

As I understand it, it is possible to change an early vote in some states, but the process is somewhat complicated, which would discourage at least some people who would like to change their votes from actually accomplishing that.

But most states don’t allow you to change an early vote.  If you vote on October 1 and your candidate comes down with covid-19 – or some shady e-mails are found on his son’s computer – on October 2, you’re stuck.  (No mulligans allowed!)

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I’m not arguing that no one should ever be allowed to vote before election day.

After all, we’ve always allowed absentee ballots to be cast early by voters who were going to be out of town on Election Day, or who had to be at their jobs the entire time that the polls were open.

It seems reasonable to me to have a voting period of four consecutive days – Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday – which would avoid conflicts with religious beliefs and make voting a lot more convenient for working folks.  (There would still be some people who had a legitimate need to vote absentee, of course, but many fewer would be voting early than did so in 2020.)

Of course, that approach wouldn’t have really addressed concerns about covid-19.  Polling places wouldn’t be as crowded if you spread voting out over four days, but it might not have been possible to maintain perfect social distancing at all polling places throughout the four-day period.  Mailing ballots to voters and allowing them to be deposited in outdoor ballot boxes presumably minimized the possibility of any significant covid-19 spread as a result of voting.

But covid-19 won’t be a concern in 2024, right?  And the odds of us having another pandemic that year are probably no greater than the odds of a candidate being struck by lightning.

I guarantee you that we’re not going back to the old ways of doing elections.  It’s not obvious why early voting would generally favor one party over the other, but in practice it turned out to advantage one party greatly in 2020.  That’s going to make both sides fight like cats and dogs when bills that concern early voting are introduced in state legislatures in the future.

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2 or 3 lines previously featured Alice Cooper’s “Elected” on November 6, 2012 – which just happened to be the day Americans went to their local polling places to elect a President.

I noted in that post that Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign raised a whopping 60% more than the campaign of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton and her supporters upped the ante considerably, raising almost twice money as much as billionaire (?) Donald Trump.

Trump and Clinton debating in 2016

The final numbers for 2020 aren’t in yet, but it’s clear that the Democrats had a huge fundraising advantage over their poor Republican cousins.  Going into the final week of the campaign, Joe Biden and Democratic Senate and House candidates had spent $6.9 billion, while Trump and the Republican congressional candidates had spent just over half that amount.

2 or 3 lines is so old that I remember when the fat cats in this country were Republicans, and the GOP was easily able to outspend the Democrats in the elections. 

But those days are l-o-n-g gone.  In 2020, Biden raised over four times as much do-re-mi from Wall Street guys as Trump did.

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Click here to watch the original music video for “Elected,” which is silly-bazilly (especially the part where the chimpanzee lights everyone’s cigarettes). 

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: