Thursday 2 June 2016

Can't make this stuff up? The pieces have been in plain sight

Rich Galen, a former press secretary to Dan Quayle, speaking to David Smith in The Guardian said: "If you’d written a novel based on what’s happened since last June, you’d have had to self-publish because no publishing house would have touched it.”

Well, I have written such a novel, and I self-published it: Faithless Elector

I shopped it around for years. While the rejections were kind and noted that it was well-written and the characters nicely developed, it always came down to the agent's or publisher's feeling that it was "far-fetched" or "too niche"; people "didn't understand the electoral process."

They do now.  And it could get stranger.

What will be the twists and turns in 2016? What new diabolical craziness awaits?  The "world" of Faithless Elector seems to become more real every day.

As recently as the last election, Robert M Alexander, reporting for CNN, quoted a 2012 Associated investigation, prior to the election, which revealed that as many as five (5) Republican Electors had expressed uncertainty regarding whether they would actually vote for Mitt Romney if he carried their state. What will be the establishment's reaction to Trump?

And one thing no one is yet talking about is what happens if the Electoral College fails to make a decision--if there is no Electoral College Vote winner (270 EC votes or more). 

As is provided in the Constitution the House votes for president, each state having only one (1) vote; and the Senate votes for the vice-president. The House and Senate are not bound by any rules to keep a unified ticket. The House could vote for the Republican and the Senate the Democrat.

So while Faithless Elector is fiction, a game of “what-if?” it turns out this is no child’s make-believe game, but is (potentially) deadly earnest. What passes in the pages of Faithless Elector hasn’t happened, isn’t meant to happen…but it could happen.  And in a strange way, I hope I'm not right.