Saw this being shared on FB; while the probability of this is rather low and it reads like a conspiracy theory, I thought it was an interesting discussion of how a three-party race could possibly play out, and it did bring up electoral rules under the 12th Amendment with which I'm pretty unfamiliar. The biggest check against this happening is that the third party candidate has to actually steal electoral votes, and most states award electoral votes on a winner-takes-all basis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-nicholas-phillips/doomsday-savior-how-paul-ryan_b_9474788.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-nicholas-phillips/doomsday-savior-how-paul-ryan_b_9474788.html
It’s hidden there in plain sight, even if it hasn’t happened since the election of 1825: The people will not pick the next president, Congress will...
Because there will be a third party candidate — and their name will likely be Mitt with a Kasich or a Rubio on the same ticket.
Michael Bloomberg practically left a breadcrumb for this theory in plain sight when he declared that he would not be running for President this cycle. While pundits focused on why the math wouldn’t work out for Bloomberg against Trump or Hillary Clinton, the former mayor of New York City buried this interesting analysis in his op-ed this week.
"In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president."
Here’s how it will happen:
Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination out right. The establishment won’t be able to stop him. He will get 50 percent. So there will be no brokered convention. There will be no Mitt Romney savior moment in Cleveland.
When Trump secures the nomination out right this summer, the establishment goes ballistic: Terrified at the prospect of losing their party with Donald Trump as president.
Suddenly they realize, “holy shit, what if we could stop Donald Trump and keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House?”
So they run a moderate establishment Republican as a third-party candidate — 100 percent as a spoiler candidate. Worst case scenario oh, they prevent Donald Trump from winning the White House. Best case scenario they pull enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to prevent her from securing the necessary majority of 270 electoral votes.
Then the election goes to a House of Representatives ballot presided over Speaker Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s former running mate in 2012.
If neither candidate gets 270 electoral college votes, Congress picks the president. And he will be called President Mitt, the one who is laying the groundwork for this doomsday electoral scenario.
It’s right there, hidden in plain sight in the 12th Amendment of the US Constitution:
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.
And Congress can pick whomever they damn well please.
If you remember, in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton was unable to secure a simple majority of the popular vote, with Ross Perot serving as a third party spoiler — not only taking votes away from the Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush, but pinching off the odd moderate vote from the Democrats as well.
But Ross Perot was never able to win a state, thus, he was never awarded any electoral college votes.
In this cycle, however, a third party spoiler candidate could in fact carry a handful of states. Bloomberg recognized it and realized the grave implications of that type of candidacy — taking the highest elected office in the free world out of the hands of the people and into the hands of a Tea Party-influenced, yet establishment-Republican Congress.
If you are an establishment Republican right now, this is actually an even better outcome than a brokered convention: Because you have even greater control over, not only the conservative nominee, but the ability to handpick the next president.