When William Henry Harrison contracted pneumonia after giving a three-hour-long speech in the snow at his 1841 inauguration and died barely a month later, he was succeeded in office by John Tyler. It was not until confronting the issues raised in the transition of power from Harrison to Tyler that Congress thought through the rules for the succession of the President when the office is vacated during mid-term.
No President-elect has in fact failed to be sworn in. Nevertheless, the rules for what would happen if a President-elect were to be unavailable to be sworn in actually became a part of our law with the adoption of the 20th Amendment in 1933. This amendment was passed primarily to shorten the length of time between the general election and the beginning of the new administration (inauguration day was moved from March to January). But it also specified that if, at the time of the inauguration, the President-elect has died, then the Vice-President-elect becomes President, and if a President has not yet been qualified by that time, then the Vice-President-elect acts as President until a President has been so qualified. The concern was that, since inauguration day was moved earlier, provision had to be made to cover cases in which the Electoral College vote did not prove decisive and the winner had to be chosen through a possibly lengthy series of votes in Congress.
In the election of 1872, Horace Greeley was the Democratic nominee for President, but the Democrats lost the general election to the Republican ticket, headed by Ulysses Grant. After the popular vote, but before the Electoral College vote, Greeley died. Because the Democrats had no chance of winning the election, given the outcome of the popular vote and the number of electoral votes already secured by Grant, the party did not bother to stipulate to their electors who an official replacement candidate would be, and most of the Democratic electors in the states that the Democrats had won cast their votes for people other than whom their party had nominated.
https://teachinghistory.org/history-...istorian/20431
During the 2018 midterm elections, a man named Dennis Hof—a Nevada reality TV star, brothel owner, and author of the book titled The Art of the Pimp—ran for the Nevada state legislature and handily won a seat representing the 36th Assembly District. There's just one problem: Hof is dead. He passed away just three weeks before the election.
Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan famously won election to the Senate in Missouri in 2000—38 days after passing away in a plane crash that also claimed the lives of his son and a campaign advisor. Carnahan beat incumbent Senator John Ashcroft—who would soon move on to serve as U.S. Attorney General for President George W. Bush. Carnahan’s wife, Jean, filled his spot in the Senate until a 2002 special election.
Patsy Mink was a trailblazing politician who served the state of Hawaii for 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in 1964 Mink became “the first woman of color elected to the national legislature and the first Asian-American congresswoman.” After a stint serving in the President Carter’s administration and as a member of the Honolulu city council, Mink returned to the U.S House of Representatives in 1990—serving until she died of pneumonia weeks before election day in 2002. A few weeks after receiving a state funeral, Mink was honored once again when the voters of Hawaii re-elected her to Congress—a seat that was re-assigned a few months later after a special election.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/26281...ll-got-elected
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President... - Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln and Free Speech, Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 47, Number 6, May 1918.
Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party Mao Zedong, 6 November, 1938 - speech to the Communist Patry of China's sixth Central Committee
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