The US presidential election process explained

I hope to explain how a US president is chosen without becoming hopelessly bogged down in minutiae (or, if you prefer, becoming bogged down in hopeless minutiae). So fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, and try to stick with me all the way to the end, at which time you will have either ascended to a higher level of enlightenment or descended to a lower circle of hell (a shout-out here to Dante Alighieri and his Inferno).

Here we go.

Until 1960, only US citizens who resided in one of the many states (currently there are 50) could vote in presidential elections. Since 1960, US citizens who reside in the District of Columbia (the nation's capital, Washington, DC) can also vote in presidential elections because of an amendment to the US Constitution. US citizens who reside in the US-owned territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Solomon Islands, and the Virgin Islands cannot vote in presidential elections. Non-citizens of the US are not permitted to vote in a presidential election no matter where they live, although some communities do allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. (The fact that in many states a person obtaining a driver's license is automatically registered to vote is a cause for much concern, nay, alarm to those who don't like that the current administration has allowed illegal border crossings into this country to surge.)

If you think the US president is determined by which candidate gets the most votes in a national election, you would be wrong. We do not have a national election for president, which makes so-called 'national polls' meaningless. No, friends, we have 51 elections held on the same day, one in every state plus the one in the District of Columbia. The US presidential election is decided by an 'electoral college' consisting of 538 electors. The candidate who wins a majority (that is, 270) electoral votes wins the presidential election. More on this in a minute. If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the US House of Representatives, where each state gets only one vote for this special circumstance, decides who will become president. (This actually occurred in 1800, 1824, and 1876. Another special circumstance occurred in 2000, when the US Supreme Court effectively decided who would be president by stopping Florida's prolonged recounting of votes because of disputed ballots with infamous 'hanging chads'.)

Why 538 electors? It's a little complicated and I'll try to make it as simple as I possibly can. There are 435 voting members of the nation's House of Representatives. The size of the US House grew as the nation grew until the number of seats was frozen in 1929. After each national census, which occurs every ten years, the number of people represented by each House seat changes, and the legislature in each state draw up a new congressional district map to accommodate the changes. This process is called reapportionment. Since the last census in 2020, some states gained seats (for example, Texas gained 2, Florida gained 1) and some states lost seats (for example, California, New York, and Pennsylvania each lost a seat). In the US Senate, the other house of our bicameral (that is, two-house) legislature, each state gets two senators regardless of its physical size or population, and because the US has 50 states, the Senate has 100 members (note that if the District of Columbia and/or the territory of Puerto Rico becomes a state the number of seats in the US Senate will increase).

If you add 435 and 100, you get 535, which is close to 538 (the number of electors in the Electoral College). The remaining three electors are allotted to the District of Columbia, which is not a state but whose residents can vote in presidential elections as I mentioned earlier, one for its population and two for senators. Each state's allotment, then, is based on its population; that is, the number of congressional districts it has (for example, California has 52, New York has 26, Wyoming has 1, and Georgia where I live has 14) plus each state gets 2 more electoral votes for having two senators.

Each political party with a candidate on the ballot puts together a slate of electors in each state (plus DC) who are pledged to vote for that party's candidate when the Electoral College meets on the same day in each state capitol. Sometimes an elector will break his or her pledge and become a 'faithless elector' who votes for someone else.

The 435 House seats are allotted to the 50 states according to their population. Each state is divided into congressional districts based on population and a representative from each district is elected to serve for two years in the nation's House of Representatives in Washington. The size of the H of R grew over the years as the nation grew and more states were added to the union. According to the most recent official census, the population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 331,449,281 in 2020. Because the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1929 and the census of 2020 counted about 332,000,000 each congressional district during this decade should contain around 750,000 people but some districts are smaller and some are larger. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, nobody's perfect.

This year, Georgia is one of seven states referred to as 'battleground states' or 'swing states' in the presidential election (the others are Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin). The remaining 43 states are considered fairly predictable as to which party they will choose based on their past selections. That is, some states are more liberal, some are more conservative, and some are toss-ups. Accordingly, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are both concentrating their presence and their campaign money contributions in the seven states I mentioned. Lucky us (I'm being sarcastic).

A month after the election, the slates of electors meet in the 50 state capitals plus the District of Columbia and officially cast their ballots. which are certified and transported to Washington. Sometimes, as I mentioned, there are 'faithless electors' who go rogue and cast their ballots for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged. In Washington, each state's certified results are opened and announced in a joint session of Congress led by the sitting Vice-President. Last time around it occurred on January 6, 2021. Maybe that date rings a bell. We won't pursue it further at this time.

Already in this campaign season, with seven weeks left until Election Day, there have been two assassination attempts on one of the major party candidates. There is trouble right here in River City, and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that doesn't stand for pool.

There now, wasn't that simple? (I'm being sarcastic again.) Seriously, I hope this post has helped you to understand how a US president is chosen. If not, I suppose it would only muddy the waters further by telling you that there actually are not 51 elections but 3,242 county or county-equivalent (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs) elections including, of course, the District of Columbia.

The 650 members of the House of Commons in the UK represent 68,000,000 people, give or take, while the 435 members of the US House of Representatives represent 335,000,000 million people currently, give or take. We are neither a monarchy nor a paiamentary system, but which government sounds more democratic to you?

Boo-boos in media, example #17,643

Somebody went to a lot of trouble creating this poster and putting it up on Facebook on the anniversary of last year's presidential election, but the numbers are just plain wrong:

Actually, the 2016 electoral college vote in the U.S. presidential election was:

Donald Trump 304
Hillary Clinton 227 (not 277)
Others 4

Others? You betcha. Keep reading.

As we all should know by now, the U.S. does not elect a president by popular vote. If it did, Hillary Clinton would be president. Instead, each state chooses a slate of electors who meet later in the 50 state capitals as an Electoral College that actually selects a president and vice-president.

In the Electoral College vote last December 19, for the first time since 1808, multiple faithless electors voted against their pledged qualified presidential candidate. Five Democrats rebelled in Washington and Hawaii, while two Republicans rebelled in Texas. Two Democratic electors, one in Minnesota and one in Colorado, were replaced after voting for Bernie Sanders and John Kasich, respectively. Electors in Maine conducted a second vote after one of its members voted for Sanders; the elector then voted for Clinton. Likewise, for the first time since 1896, multiple faithless electors voted against the pledged qualified vice presidential candidate.

One Clinton elector in Colorado attempted to vote for John Kasich. The single vote was ruled invalid by Colorado state law, the elector was dismissed, and an alternative elector was sworn in who voted for Clinton.

One Clinton elector in Minnesota voted for Bernie Sanders as President and Tulsi Gabbard as vice president; his votes were discarded and he was replaced by an alternate who voted for Clinton.

One Clinton elector in Maine voted for Bernie Sanders; this vote was invalidated as "improper" and the elector subsequently voted for Clinton.

Four Clinton electors in Washington did not vote for Clinton (three votes went to Colin Powell, and one to Faith Spotted Eagle).

One Trump elector in Georgia resigned before the vote rather than vote for Trump and was replaced by an alternate.

Two Trump electors in Texas did not vote for Trump (one vote went to John Kasich, one to Ron Paul); one elector did not vote for Pence and instead voted for Carly Fiorina for Vice-President; a third resigned before the vote rather than vote for Trump and was replaced by an alternate.

One Clinton elector in Hawaii voted for Bernie Sanders.

Of the faithless votes, Colin Powell and Elizabeth Warren were the only two to receive more than one; Powell received three electoral votes for President and Warren received two for Vice President. Receiving one valid electoral vote each were Sanders, John Kasich, Ron Paul and Faith Spotted Eagle for President, and Carly Fiorina, Susan Collins, Winona LaDuke and Maria Cantwell for Vice President. Sanders is the first Jewish American to receive an electoral vote for President. LaDuke is the first Green Party member to receive an electoral vote, and Paul is the third member of the Libertarian Party to do so, following the party's presidential and vice-presidential nominees each getting one vote in 1972. It is the first election with faithless electors from more than one political party. The seven people to receive electoral votes for president were the most in a single election since 1796, and more than any other election since the enactment of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.

And now, as radio newscaster Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story.

Yours for accuracy in media,
rhymeswithplague

All 51 races from bluest (“most democrat”) to reddest (”most republican”)

I’m hoping that by now you are all aware that the U.S. doesn’t have “a presidential election,” it has 51 presidential elections (each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, better known as Washington, D.C.) and each one is important because of our Electoral College approach to choosing our president.

In president-choosing years, ours is an indirect democracy in which each state chooses a slate of electors who will meet in their respective state capitals on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December (this year, December 17th) to do the actual choosing of the next president. The slates vary in size from 3 for the District of Columbia (because it has a single member in the House of Representatives and two Senators in the Senate) to 55 for California (because it has 53 members in the House of Representatives and two Senators in the Senate). Each race is distinct, unique, and separate from all the others. The total national popular vote is ignored completely.

This is the reason that although Al Gore in 2000 and Richard Nixon in 1960 received more popular votes nationally than their opponents (George W. Bush and John F. Kennedy, respectively), they did not win the presidency. Also, the electors are supposed to vote for the party they were elected to vote for, but there are no hard and fast rules. In reality, the electors can vote for whomever they darned well please. This has made for some interesting elections in the past.

Here’s an interesting table from Nate Silver’s column in The New York Times. His predictions regarding the late unpleasantness the 2012 U.S. Presidential election were more accurate than any other pollster in the country.

I’m hoping that the chart will become larger (and hence easier to read) if you click on it. If it does not, get out a magnifying glass.

[Editor's note. Apparently the chart does not enlarge here in my post. Forget the magnifying glass. You can see the chart much better here. --RWP]

From Nate Silver’s interesting perspective, it was Colorado, not Ohio, that put Barack Obama over the required 270 electoral votes.

To my great surprise, Nate Silver’s chart also indicates that my state, Georgia, was the second-least Republican state in 2012 (North Carolina was the least, barely falling into the Romney column). Perhaps the once-solid Democratic South that turned into a solid Republican South with the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 is closer than ever to being not as solid as a lot of people might think.

In the meantime, let’s hear it for Nate Silver!

Electoral College for Dummies (2012 edition)

[Editor’s note. This post is almost identical to an earlier post of mine called Electoral College for Dummies that I sprung on an unsuspecting world created on November 3, 2008, except for one important difference. The little green map has been updated to reflect the current makeup of the electoral college, which has changed since the last presidential election because of the decennial re-apportionment (now there’s a mouthful) following the census of 2010. --RWP]

I am assuming here at the beginning of this post (always a bad idea) that you already know two things:

(1) That when you cast your vote one month from tomorrow (or earlier in some states) you will not be voting for the candidates whose names are on the ballot but for a slate of electors who will represent your state in something called the electoral college, and...

(2) That the number of electoral votes a state is entitled to cast in the electoral college is determined by adding together the number of its U.S. Senators (there are two from every state) and the number of its U.S. Representatives to Congress (one from each congressional district, the total number of which can change every ten years based on the state’s official population as reported in the most recent U.S. Census, which may not bear much resemblance to the state’s actual population).

I have to assume you already know these things because you cannot learn them from the article I am about to share with you. So, dear reader, if you are a real glutton for punishment and are wondering how in the heck that electoral college thing works, reproduced below is the complete text of an article at a website called www.electoralvote.com, with its original paragraphing and spacing intact.

All righty, then, class, let’s begin:

Electoral College

The United States Electoral College is the official name of the group of Presidential Electors who are chosen every four years to cast the electoral vote and thereby elect the President and Vice President of the United States. It was established by Article Two, Section One of the United States Constitution, which provides for a quadrennial election of Presidential Electors in each state. The electoral process was modified in 1804 with the ratification of the 12th Amendment and again in 1961 with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment.

The Electoral College is administered at the national level by the National Archives and Records Administration via its Office of the Federal Register. The actual meetings of electors in each state are administered by state officials. The Presidential Electors meet in their respective state capitals in December, 41 days following the election, at which time they cast their electoral votes. Thus the “electoral college” never meets as one national body. They ballot for President, then ballot for vice president. Afterward, the Electors sign a document called the Certificate of Vote which sets forth the number of votes cast for these two offices and is signed by all Electors. Multiple copies of the Certificate of Vote are signed, in order to provide multiple originals in case one is lost. One copy is sent to president of the Senate (i.e. the sitting Vice President of the United States); the certificates are placed in two special mahogany boxes where they await a joint session of the new Congress where they are opened and counted. Candidates must receive a majority of the electoral vote to be declared the president-elect or vice-president-elect. If no candidate for President receives an absolute electoral majority 270 votes out of the 538 possible, then the new House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately to vote for President. (This would likely just occur when more than two candidates receive electoral votes, but could theoretically happen in a two-person contest, if each received exactly 269 electoral votes). In this case, the House of Representatives chooses from the three candidates who received the most electoral votes, but could not establish a majority of votes in the College. The House votes en-bloc by state for this purpose (that is, one vote per state, which is determined by the majority decision of the delegation from that state; if a state delegation is evenly split, a deadlock normally results, and that state is considered as abstaining). This vote would be repeated if necessary until one candidate receives the votes of more than half the state delegations -- at least 26 state votes, given the current number, 50, of states in the union. If no candidate for Vice President receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, then the United States Senate must do the same, with the top two vote getters for that office as candidates. The Senate votes in the normal manner in this case, not by States. It is unclear if the sitting Vice President would be entitled to cast his usual tie-breaking vote if the Senate should be evenly split on the matter. If the House of Representatives has not chosen a winner in time for the inauguration (noon on January 20), then the Constitution of the United States specifies that the new Vice President becomes Acting President until the House selects a President. If the winner of the Vice Presidential election is not known by then either, then under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Speaker of the House of Representatives would become Acting President until the House selects a President or the Senate selects a Vice President. On the one hand, the Twelfth Amendment specifies that the Senate should choose the Vice President, and it does not admit of a time limit on the selection process. On the other hand, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the President to nominate a Vice President if a vacancy should occur. As of 2006, the House of Representatives has elected the President on two occasions, in 1801 and in 1825. The Senate has chosen the Vice President once, in 1837.

[end of article]

There now, isn’t that simple?

Here’s a pretty map to look at until your head stops spinning:

I think the map will enlarge if you click on it.

There are two things the website neglected to tell us:

(1) Nowhere in the process does it say that the slates of electors in each state must vote for the candidate who received the most popular votes in their state on Election Day; each elector can actually do as he or she jolly well pleases.

(2) If those two special boxes aren’t mahogany, the whole election is null and void and has to be done over.

(Note to the gullible: Only one of the two preceding statements is true.)

Now that you are no longer a rank dummy on the subject, you may have thought of a question or two concerning the electoral college yourself, such as: What was the original process before the Constitution had any amendments? How did the the 12th amendment change the process? How did the 23rd amendment change the process? What about the District of Columbia? Why was there no Presidential Succession Act until 1947? Which two presidents were selected by the House of Representatives in 1801 and 1825? Which vice-president, and whose, was selected by the Senate in 1837? What does quadrennial mean?

As they used to say on Mission Impossible, your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to find out for yourself the answers to these questions.

Here are the original cast members of Mission Impossible. Instead of worrying about how well your candidate will do, try to name them all without help. Can you do it?



If your head is starting to spin again, put it between your legs for a couple of minutes, take two aspirin, and call me in the morning. Or you could try gazing at that map again.

[Update from 2008. It has now been exactly four weeks since the election and absolutely no one has bothered to try to identify the cast members of Mission Impossible. So, in the interest of spreading knowledge and truth everywhere, I will. In no particular order, they are Peter Graves, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, Martin Landau, and Peter Lupus. There, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Barbara Bain and Martin Landau were husband and wife, and Peter Graves was the brother of James Arness of Gunsmoke fame. Also, Warren Beatty is Shirley MacLaine’s brother, and for the really ancient among you, Ricardo Montalban married Loretta Young’s sister, and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes to Leslie Howard’s Ashley in Gone With The Wind) was the sister of Joan Fontaine (Jane Eyre to Orson Welles’s Rochester in Jane Eyre). Not a single one of those fascinating tidbits of show-biz trivia has anything to do with either Mission Impossible or the workings of the Electoral College. --RWP, 12/2/2008]

Cure for insomnia discovered

Public Law 62-5, an act of Congress in 1911, set the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives at 435. That number was expanded temporarily to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959, and then reverted to 435 in the reapportionment following the 1960 census. The U.S. Constitution states only that there will be a representative for no less than 30,000 citizens.

The first U.S. census in 1790 counted nearly four million Americans. By 2000, the number had grown to over 281 million. Based on a population clock maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population as of November 17, 2008, was 305,682,072 persons. It is expected to reach 308 million by 2010 and 439 million by 2050.

“So what?” you may be saying to yourself. “What does that have to do with me?”

If you are an American citizen, here’s what it has to do with you:

All men and women may be created equal, but all votes are not created equal. In 1790, the House of Representatives had 65 members and the U.S. had just under 4,000,000 population. Each representative elected to the United States House of Representatives represented around 61,000 persons. Currently, with 435 representatives for a population of more than 306,000,000 in the U.S., each representative represents around 703,000 persons. But that is only an average, and it gives a decidedly distorted view. Some House districts are currently nearly twice the size of others; for instance, there are about 944,000 residents in Montana’s single district, compared to about 515,000 in Wyoming’s. So we see that, the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

There is not room here to explain all the ramifications of what I just told you.

To understand the situation a little better, I recommend that you read every last word of this article from Wikipedia on congressional reapportionment followed by a thorough perusal (in the dictionary sense, not the popular sense) of this article, which includes a section on electoral apportionment that contains a table showing both the population per House seat in each state and the population per electoral vote (they are not the same).

This should be an eye-opening experience for many of you, but I fear it may have the opposite effect.

However, if you can name this happy couple, you will receive extra credit -- one point if you can name the gentleman, one point if you can name the building in Washington, D.C., named for him, one point if you know the lady’s maiden name, and one point if you can name the lady’s father. No cheating allowed.


Let’s make it a multiple-choice test:

1. The gentleman’s name is:
...(a) Henry Clay
...(b) Nicholas Longworth
...(c) Sam Rayburn
...(d) Eugene “Tip” O’Neill
...(e) None of the above

2. The building in Washington, D.C., named after him is:
...(a) The Capitol
...(b) The Lincoln Memorial
...(c) Union Station
...(d) Sam’s Pizza Parlor and Dry Goods Emporium
...(e) The Washington Monument

3. The lady is:
...(a) Norma Jean Baker Rayburn
...(b) Oona Chaplin O’Neill
...(c) Alice Roosevelt Longworth
...(d) Erma Bombeck Clay
...(e) None of the above.

4. The lady’s father was:
...(a) Charlie Chaplin
...(b) Howard Baker
...(c) Grover Cleveland
...(d) Teddy Roosevelt
...(e) No one knows for sure.

And five extra points if you can identify this guy:


He is none other than:
...(a) John McCormack (D, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(b) Joseph Martin (R, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(c) Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill (D, Massachusetts), Speaker of the House
...(d) Dennis Hastert (R, Illinois), Speaker of the House
...(e) Nancy Pelosi (D, California), Speaker of the House
...(f) Newt Gingrich (R, Georgia), Speaker of the House

Electoral College For Dummies

I am assuming here at the beginning of this post (always a bad idea) that you already know two things:

(1) That when you vote tomorrow you will not be voting for the candidates whose names are on the ballot but for a slate of electors who will represent your state in the electoral college, and

(2) That the number of electoral votes a state is entitled to cast in the electoral college is determined by adding together the number of its U.S. Senators (there are two from every state) and the number of its U.S. Representatives to Congress (one from each congressional district, the total number of which can change every ten years based on the state’s official population as reported in the most recent U.S. Census, which may not bear much resemblance to the state’s actual population).

I have to assume you already know these things because you would never find them out from the article I am about to share with you. So, dear reader, if you are a real glutton for punishment and are wondering how in the heck that electoral college thing works, reproduced below is the complete text of an article at a website called www.electoralvote.com, with its original paragraphing and spacing intact.

All righty, then, class, let’s begin:

Electoral College

The United States Electoral College is the official name of the group of Presidential Electors who are chosen every four years to cast the electoral vote and thereby elect the President and Vice President of the United States. It was established by Article Two, Section One of the United States Constitution, which provides for a quadrennial election of Presidential Electors in each state. The electoral process was modified in 1804 with the ratification of the 12th Amendment and again in 1961 with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment.

The Electoral College is administered at the national level by the National Archives and Records Administration via its Office of the Federal Register. The actual meetings of electors in each state are administered by state officials. The Presidential Electors meet in their respective state capitals in December, 41 days following the election, at which time they cast their electoral votes. Thus the “electoral college” never meets as one national body. They ballot for President, then ballot for vice president. Afterward, the Electors sign a document called the Certificate of Vote which sets forth the number of votes cast for these two offices and is signed by all Electors. Multiple copies of the Certificate of Vote are signed, in order to provide multiple originals in case one is lost. One copy is sent to president of the Senate (i.e. the sitting Vice President of the United States); the certificates are placed in two special mahogany boxes where they await a joint session of the new Congress where they are opened and counted. Candidates must receive a majority of the electoral vote to be declared the president-elect or vice-president-elect. If no candidate for President receives an absolute electoral majority 270 votes out of the 538 possible, then the new House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately to vote for President. (This would likely just occur when more than two candidates receive electoral votes, but could theoretically happen in a two-person contest, if each received exactly 269 electoral votes). In this case, the House of Representatives chooses from the three candidates who received the most electoral votes, but could not establish a majority of votes in the College. The House votes en-bloc by state for this purpose (that is, one vote per state, which is determined by the majority decision of the delegation from that state; if a state delegation is evenly split, a deadlock normally results, and that state is considered as abstaining). This vote would be repeated if necessary until one candidate receives the votes of more than half the state delegations -- at least 26 state votes, given the current number, 50, of states in the union. If no candidate for Vice President receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, then the United States Senate must do the same, with the top two vote getters for that office as candidates. The Senate votes in the normal manner in this case, not by States. It is unclear if the sitting Vice President would be entitled to cast his usual tie-breaking vote if the Senate should be evenly split on the matter. If the House of Representatives has not chosen a winner in time for the inauguration (noon on January 20), then the Constitution of the United States specifies that the new Vice President becomes Acting President until the House selects a President. If the winner of the Vice Presidential election is not known by then either, then under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Speaker of the House of Representatives would become Acting President until the House selects a President or the Senate selects a Vice President. On the one hand, the Twelfth Amendment specifies that the Senate should choose the Vice President, and it does not admit of a time limit on the selection process. On the other hand, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the President to nominate a Vice President if a vacancy should occur. As of 2006, the House of Representatives has elected the President on two occasions, in 1801 and in 1825. The Senate has chosen the Vice President once, in 1837.

[end of article]

There now, isn’t that simple?

Here’s a pretty map to look at until your head stops spinning:



Two things the website neglected to tell us: (1) Nowhere in the process does it say that the slates of electors in each state must vote for the candidate who received the most popular votes in their state on Election Day; each elector can actually do as he or she jolly well pleases. (2) If those two special boxes aren’t mahogany, the whole election is null and void and has to be done over. (Note to the gullible: Only one of the two preceding statements is true.)

Now that you are no longer a rank dummy on the subject, you may have thought of a question or two concerning the electoral college yourself, such as: What was the original process before the Constitution had any amendments? How did the the 12th amendment change the process? How did the 23rd amendment change the process? What about the District of Columbia? Why was there no Presidential Succession Act until 1947? Which two presidents were selected by the House of Representatives in 1801 and 1825? Which vice-president, and whose, was selected by the Senate in 1837? What does quadrennial mean?

As they used to say on Mission Impossible, your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to find out for yourself the answers to these questions.

Here are the original cast members of Mission Impossible. While you’re sitting up late listening to election returns, try to name them all without help. Can you do it?



If your head is starting to spin again, put it between your legs for a couple of minutes, take two aspirin, and call me in the morning. Or you could try gazing at that map again.

[Update. It has now been exactly four weeks since the election and absolutely no one has bothered to try to identify the cast members of Mission Impossible. So, in the interest of spreading knowledge and truth everywhere, I will. In no particular order, they are Peter Graves, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, Martin Landau, and Peter Lupus. There, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Barbara Bain and Martin Landau were husband and wife, and Peter Graves was the brother of James Arness of Gunsmoke. Also, Warren Beatty is Shirley MacLaine’s brother, and for the really ancient among you, Ricardo Montalban married Loretta Young’s sister, and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes to Leslie Howard’s Ashley in Gone With The Wind) was the sister of Joan Fontaine (Jane Eyre to Orson Welles’s Rochester in Jane Eyre), but not a single one of those fascinating tidbits of trivia has anything to do with either Mission Impossible or the workings of the Electoral College. --RWP, 12/2/2008]