If you haven't read "Political Reform and Compulsory Voting", please go back and read that post before continuing. I'll be using that post, to present a hypothetical situation, that just sort of came to me. I'm not sure if it's a good plan or not, I just came up with it about three minutes ago, so we can work through this situation together. It will be a bonding experience.
Let us suppose that a significant number of Americans were to vote "third party" in this coming Tuesday's midterm election. Now, I realize that there are thousands of third parties out there, so let's just pick one for this example. Let's go with the "Green Party" just because they are probably the most well-known of the third parties.
[For the record: The "Tea Party" isn't a third party. They are a schism from the Republican party, and derive all of their votes from the more "far right" among that party. If the Tea Party were to win a significant election (i.e. the Presidency) the Republican party would fall, and Republicans would be absorbed into the Tea Party. They are not a third party, so much as a referendum on whether the Republican party should be more extremist or more neutral.]
Let's say that the "independent" voters are out in force on Tuesday. They're all voting Green, and the Green Party end up winning the House of Representatives seats in Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North and South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. I picked these seven states because they only get one Representative in the House. Let's say the Green Party won the small battles but they still got tromped in all of the big states (and even all of the only mildly important states).
Fast forward now to November of 2016. Galvanized by their outstanding success (at least for a third party) in the midterms, the Green Party has started getting its name out there, and has a candidate who - while maybe not a "serious contender" for the presidency - is at least on the radar of the general populace. Election day comes and goes, Florida has yet another election fraud controversy and recounts their votes about 80 times just to be on the safe side, and the Electoral results are in: Republicans: 264, Democrats: 265, Green Party: 9. Nobody wins the election.
Per the Constitution, the names of the top three candidates go to the House of Representatives. The Representatives group up according to which state they're from, and prepare to cast their one ballot as a state. But wait! The Green Party controls seven states from back in the 2014 election! The Representatives from all 50 states cast their ballots and results are in: Republicans: 25, Democrats: 22, Green Party: 7. That close! Republicans got 50%, but they didn't get 50% +1! There's still no President!
What happens now? We move over to the Senate!
Since no one got the 270 Electoral votes, the names of the top two candidates for Vice President go to the Senate, and the Senators cast their ballots for Vice President. Since only the names of the top two candidates are up for election, odds are someone will be elected to the Vice Presidency. Whether their are Green Party Senators in the Senate or not - unless there's a perfect 50/50 split - either the Democrat or the Republican candidate will be elected to the Vice Presidency. However, because there is no President, the newly elected Vice President will assume the role of President!
[In case you were wondering, if there were a 50/50 split in the Senate, Section Three of the Twentieth Amendment says that it's up to Congress to establish a policy to decide how to elect the President.]
After all of that campaigning, and all of those political commercials, and all of those all of those votes, and all of that effort on the part of all three parties and their constituents, Congress has decreed that one of the people who was running for Vice President shall be the President! DEMOCRACY!!!
After all that, it's a return to business as usual among the two major parties. Virtually nothing has changed. It's all over.
Or is it?
From here, there are two possible outcomes:
1) Crushed by its long, drawn out, extremely bureaucratic defeat, the Green Party has lost all momentum and has essentially been charged by the U.S. populace with entirely undermining the democratic process in the U.S. It recedes back to being a non-player in U.S. politics, and is shortly remembered only as a footnote in history books. Everything returns to as it was.
2) The Green Party kept most of its seats in the House in the 2016 election, and maybe even won a Senate seat or two. It's on people's radar, and growing in popularity. People are upset by the bureaucracy of the last election, but they hate Democrats and Republicans even more. Realizing the possibility of losing power, the Democrats and Republicans put their heads together and come up with a grand scheme to stay in power: The 28th Amendment, reform the Electoral College to replace the word "Majority" with "Plurality", thereby changing the rule from "50%+1" to "More than anyone else". Suddenly the Green Party's ability to get 9 electoral votes is meaningless, because the Democrats and Republicans can still get more than 9. This initially serves as a pretty nasty blow to the Green Party's hopes of getting elected to the Presidency, but the important part is that the door is now open to third parties. A huge obstacle to third party politics in the U.S. has just been removed.
So to make a long story short (it may be too late for that), there is the tiniest, most minute flicker of probability that a third party vote could actually effect change in the U.S. Democratic system. However, it only works if:
1) A state elects more Representatives from a specific third party than from any other party during a midterm
2) The following presidential election secures enough electoral votes for a third party that it prevents either candidate from the two major parties from getting the required 270 Electoral votes.
3) When the House of Representatives goes to a vote, enough states need to have elected Representatives from the third party, that it prevents the two major parties from electing their respective candidates. (In theory, this means at least one state needs to be dominated by third party Representatives, but in practice it would probably need to be more than one.)
4) After the third party loses the election in the Senate (which is inevitable) their popularity needs to continue to grow to the point where there is a serious concern that the Senate might be deciding the next Presidential election as well; and Republicans and Democrats need to decide to resolve the issue via Constitutional Amendment as opposed to some other cockamamie scheme.
While the odds of this happening are... probably worse than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot, there might be a tiny flicker of a chance that voting third party could actually accomplish something.
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