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Both Democrats in the Equality State seem to be upset about Richard Cheney's recent change in voting registration, from Texas to Wyoming.
This was expedient if he was to run for national office on the same ticket as George W. Bush, on account of the federal constitution.
As you may recall from a civics class, the president and vice-president are not elected directly by voters. When we cast a ballot for a given candidate, we're actually voting for presidential electors who are pledged to that candidate, and who in turn do the only voting that actually counts. Each state gets as many electors as it has representatives and senators -- eight for Colorado with its six representatives and two senators.
That's the electoral college
-- not an
educational institution, but in another sense of the word:
a company or assemblage ... having a common purpose or
common duties,
as with the American College of
Surgeons.
In Article 2 of the federal constitution, which
establishes the presidency, the electors were to cast
their ballots for two persons, of whom one at least shall
not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.
The candidate with a majority became president, and the
runner-up was vice-president.
The 12th amendment, ratified in 1804 after the
electoral-college tie of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and
Aaron Burr, changed this so that electors cast separate
ballots for president and vice-president. But the required
geographic diversity remained in effect: the electors would
vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of
whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same
state with themselves.
As I read this, it doesn't forbid the president and vice-president from being from the same state. What it does do is prohibit that state's electors from putting their own in both offices.
In other words, if both candidates were from Texas, then the Texas electors could not vote for both candidates. It wouldn't keep Colorado or Delaware electors from voting for two Texans.
The Founding Fathers were trying to forge a nation out
of disparate states. If each state's electors could vote
for favorite sons
for both president and
vice-president, no candidate would ever get a majority.
By forcing electors to look outside their own states for at least one candidate, the Founding Fathers also forced a more general national perspective on the electors.
This also kept one state from monopolizing the offices. Even if four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, then the most populous state, their vice-presidents were from Massachusetts and New York.
Back then, geography mattered a lot more than it does now, although we like to pretend that it's still a factor.
For instance, we prefer that candidates to be from somewhere, and so George Bush the Elder, a New Englander by birth and education and a Beltway insider by career, maintained a legal residence in Texas (a hotel room) and professed a fondness for horseshoes, pork rinds and the Oak Ridge Boys.
Al Gore may have grown up in Washington, and spent most of his adult life there as a congressman, senator and vice-president -- but he would prefer us to think of him as a mule-driving farm boy from Carthage, Tenn.
And of course, there's Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Midwesterner who moved to Arkansas, then Washington, before announcing she was a New Yorker.
Also I recall, from my days editing the Breckenridge paper in 1977-78, a group of Littleton residents who wanted to vote in the Blue River municipal election. They all swore that a certain cabin -- one with six feet of untrammeled snow around it -- was their regular and habitual residence, and when this was challenged, the Colorado Supreme Court essentially ruled that your legal residence is pretty much wherever you want to claim it is.
In short, this whole question of where one is an
inhabitant
seems increasingly irrelevant. What we
have today is virtual residency,
where you can claim
to live in whatever place is most politically expedient:
Wyoming for Dick Cheney, New York for Hillary Clinton,
etc.
Perhaps we should get rid of the pretenses by constitutional and legal reform, but on the other hand, it wouldn't be half as entertaining as watching the legal-residence antics of people who really want us to think they're honest.
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