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“If Obama wins, pull the “but he’s not a citizen” card we have now.. wait - would Obama’s VP choice become president then (before Obama sworn in), or would McCain become president or.... oh, my brain hurts!”

If Obama wins the election (God forbid) and is shown not to be a citizen prior to the Electoral College meeting, the Democrats would probably get the electors to vote for someone else for president (could be Hillary, could be the VP, whoever) and if they elect Obama’s VP as President they would obviously elect someone else as VP.

If Obama is shown not to be a citizen after the Electoral College meets but before the electoral votes are counted by the new Congress on January 3, then there are two possible results:

(i) Obama is declared the president-elect (and his VP the VP-elect) and then, on January 20 (Inauguration Day), the presidency is declared vacant because the president-elect does not qualify for the office and the VP-elect is sworn in as president and immediately becomes the president; or

(ii) following the precedent of 1872, in which the few electoral votes cast for Horace Greeley (who had died after the election but before the Electoral College met, but who received a few electoral votes from presidential electors that I guess didn’t care that he was dead) were ruled by Congress to be null and void because the candidate wasn’t eligible for the office, electoral votes cast for Obama are declared void and thus no candidate would have a majority of electoral votes; in such case, the House, with each state delegation having one vote, would elect the president from among the three persons with the most presidential electoral votes (the last time it did this was in 1824, when it elected John Quincy Adams), and since McCain would presumably be the only eligible candidate to have received electoral votes I guess that McCain would necessarily be elected (he’d obviously get at least one Representative from at least 26 states to vote for him).

Thus, if Obama is found not to be a citizen after the Electoral College meets but before Congress counts the votes, the Democrat-controlled Congress would overturn the Greeley precedent (which, in my honest opinion, was idiotic in the first place) and would count the electoral votes for Obama, declaring him the winner, and his VP would become president on Inauguration Day because Obama wouldn’t qualify for office.

I’m assuming, by the way, that the Democrats wouldn’t be tyrannical enough as to insist that Obama become president even though he doesn’t meet the constitutional qualifications.