No, I’m saying that because once he died in October, it was deemed too late to have a substitute candidate on the ballot and that since he no longer met state or federal requirements of being a legal citizen of the state, his name should be removed from the ballot. There should’ve been no Democrat nominee on the official ballot. They had ample time to mount a write-in candidacy for the widow.
My point here is simple: #1, Mel Carnahan being deceased, was not a legal candidate under either state/fed law. Since he was not a legal candidate, and was illegally kept on the ballot, any votes for him could not be counted as legitimate. #2, Since only the votes for legal candidates could be counted, that meant that (absent a write-in campaign for Jean Carnahan) Ashcroft would win because he had no Democrat opponent due to Mel Carnahan’s disqualification and it being too late to offer a substitute nominee on the Dem ballot. #3, Because Carnahan was illegally declared the winner when his candidacy was illegitimate due to death, there was no vacancy to be filled and therefore Gov. Wilson could not appoint anyone to the seat effective 1/3/2001.
I will continue to argue this point that this was both an illegal election AND illegal appointment. The only way in which it would not have been is if Mel Carnahan had been alive on Election Day, won the election, and died in the interim between November and January, in which case the Governor would then be empowered to make an appointment to the seat, with a special election to be held no later than November 2002.
Although laws vary from state to state on the process of replacing nominees due to whatever reason after a primary has been held, I would make the argument absent state law (as in the case of my state of TN, which requires a dead nominee be removed from the ballot, or MO), federal law would seem to indicate that this should be the policy for every state for Congress/Senate. If a nominee is deceased before a general election, rendering them a non-resident, they are no longer a qualified candidate and must be removed from the ballot and no votes for them counted.
You are ignoring the multiple precedents of already dead people finishing first in an election, all of which (as far as I know) resulting in the dead person being declared the winner and a vacancy being declared. Besides the congressional examples that I provided, it has happened many times at other levels. Being unqualified for office means that one may not take the seat, not that the votes that one receives don’t count.
And neither the U.S. Constitution nor federal law require that candidates on the ballot be constitutionally qualified for the office. Yes, Article I requires that a Senator have been an inhabitant, on Election Day, of the state that he represents, but that us a requirement *to hold the Senate seat* (not to appear on the ballot), and the entity entrusted to enforce such requirement—the U.S. Senate, which is the “judge of the qualifications of its Members”—can only enforce the requirement by judging the Senator-elect unqualified and thus excluding him from the Senate. Each state has its own rules for ballot access, and some states even permit persons who admittedly are not natural-born citizens (or even U.S. citizens)’ to appear on the ballot as presidential candidates; you may recall that, in 2004 and 2008, the Socialist Workers Party nominated Roger Calero, a Nicaraguan immigrant who was a U.S. permanent resident but not a U.S. citizen (much less a natural-born citizen), as its candidate for president, and Calero appeared on the ballot in dozens of states (nine states did exclude those who aren’t NBCs, and Calero was replaced on the ballot in those states by James Harris).