The New York State Bar Association’s Task Force on the Presidential election held an information session on the laws that will determine how the winner of the election is decided. Adjunct Professor Jerry Goldfeder is the chairman of the task force and Professor Jed Shugerman is a task force member.
With less than three weeks until Election Day, millions of voters are planning to cast their ballots in non-traditional ways, and Americans are coming to the realization that there might not be a clear winner when the sun rises on Nov. 4.
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Jerry Goldfeder, chair of the Task Force on the Presidential Election, special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an adjunct professor of election law at Fordham Law School:
Just in case anybody thinks this is all ancient history, and this hasn’t happened really in a long time, it’s true that it could happen. We have a ton of mail-in ballots that may take a very long time to be counted. And as Jack was saying, it’s done under state law, and we can expect an avalanche of lawsuits. Again, it will be determined by state law. And now we turn to the federal constitution and the federal law to see how that plays into this process
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Q: If neither candidate gets the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the election, then what?
A: Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and author of a book that traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review and the influence of money and parties in American courts
There are too many details to go into all of them, but there are a lot of ways that the Electoral College might fail to get a majority and that for a number of reasons about whether you can get a majority of the electors appointed, how to define the word appointed. And we think there’s a rabbit hole of the various ways that either house could engage in hardball to not allow the Electoral College to certify. So then there are, I would say, four steps after that. The first step is is that the Constitution says that the presidential term ends Jan. 20th. There is no extension at that time. So the current president ends his administration on Jan. 20th, and then we go into these next three steps of scenarios.
