I am amazed there hasn't been more comment on this, so I'll make one.

Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State, has taken the time to actually read the Supreme Court's Bush vs. Gore decision of 2000, under which the incumbent President was selected. The reasoning used to support Gov. Bush's drive to end recounts could, he says, strike a stake through the heart of America's democracy.

But let him explain it.

"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," the court said, "unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College." (The emphasis is mine.) (The map, from Wikipedia, will be explained in good time.)

In other words if the election is close, and one party controls a state government, it could ignore the votes of its citizens and order its electoral votes given to the candidate it chooses.

I was unhappy about the 2000 decision, but I know, as a student of history, that such things have happened before. John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay kept Andrew Jackson from the White House in 1824. Republicans made a deal with southern state electors to deny the White House to Samuel Tilden in 1876. Grover Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888 but was denied re-election by several close wins by Benjamin Harrison, which gave the Republican the electoral college. (That's "President Tilden," to the right, from Antiquephotographics.com.)

It happens. There are many ways in which Americans "steal" elections. The point is that the system has been resilient to allow that, to go on, and to redress the balance over time. Jackson won the 1828 election overwhelmingly. Reformers took both parties' nominations in 1880. Cleveland came back in 1892. An alleged injustice is followed by justice.

But if an election is denied to keep an incumbent's questionable hold on power despite the will of the people, I don't know.

I really don't.