The Constitutional Perils of Election-Eve Deaths

Today, Sen. Paul Wellstone, who was running for re-election to a third term, died in a plane crash in Minnesota. In 2000, after Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan died under similar circumstances, legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar argued that election law needs to be re-tuned to prevent such tragedies from becoming constitutional disasters. (Pay special attention to the last paragraph of the story, which correctly predicted a different kind of electoral crisis.)

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