Many people are so accustomed to public elections being conducted by
public officials at public expense that they are unaware that public
elections need not be so conducted. In most jurisdictions the rules
for the conduct of public elections are separated from any rules
concerning official management or financing of them, and the
connection need not exist for public elections to be "official" and
authoritative.
Rules, usually statutes, for the conduct of elections generally
specify:
1. Public notice, typically posted in at least three public places
and perhaps in the newspaper of record, at least 10, 20, or 30 days
before the election day.
2. Polling places, also part of a public notice.
3. Balloting procedures and methods.
4. Counting and announcement of results.
Statutes specifying that certain public officials conduct certain
elections are sometimes expressed in terms of permission rather than
mandate, or even just presumed as a matter of custom or tradition.
Funding may be merely a matter of an item in a budget.
What this allows is for private volunteers at their own expense to
conduct elections of officials who then have real legal authority,
as long as the election is conducted according to law. Indeed, such
a process can even create new officials with new authority that is
not covered in law.
The very first elections in most jurisdictions were conducted that
way, as they had to be before there were any officials or any public
treasury.
To consider a hypothetical in which this may need to be done,
imagine a county where all of the officials, having spent or
absconded with all the public funds and other assets, just walk away
from their positions and leave their people without any functioning
government. Such government would have to be recreated from scratch,
using available law but nothing else but unpaid volunteers. Yet if
they followed the law for the conduct of elections (other perhaps
than that of the dates held), the persons thus elected would thereby
have the authority to assume the vacant offices, and if the old
officials returned and tried to reclaim their positions, they could
be lawfully excluded from doing so.
It is interesting to study the history of such rump elections, which
can bring out many of the fundamental principles that still govern
us today.
-- Jon
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Constitution Society http://constitution.org
2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322 twitter.com/lex_rex
Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 jon.roland@constitution.org
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