Yet another way to steal a presidential election: a political thriller explores how our antiquated Electoral College system could be put to nefarious use.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: THE ELECTORS - Book review

The Electors by Roy Neel Recount Press, 328 pp.

Pity poor Shakespeare. Moored as he was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the heyday of the divine right of kings, the Bard did not have a wealth of democratic systems upon which to draw for inspiration. When he wanted to write a succession drama, the playwright, who was nothing if not adaptive, was stuck with monarchies and the boring right of primogeniture, where everyone understands that the king's son or another male relative will without argument take the crown when the old king dies. Which means that a Shakespearean usurper who wanted to seize the throne was also stuck. He couldn't pack the ballot box, or bribe a judge, or engineer an impeachment, or persuade five judges of a Supreme Court who all happen to come from the same party to set a nonbinding, good-for-one-use-only precedent to decide an election. All he could do was kill people, which is how we end up with Claudius killing Hamlet's father, and Macbeth killing Duncan, and Richard III killing the young princes, one merry murder after another, all designed to move the killer into a higher slot in the order of succession.

Imagine the fun the Bard would have had with a modern democracy like the United States, the most powerful country in the world, the lone superpower, the apex of modernity, which persists on selecting its chief executive with an elaborate eighteenth-century, pre-industrial system that allows the meddlesome participation of county boards, state legislators, party officials, federal bureaucrats, the House of Representatives, judges and justices of every stripe, and a mystical entity called the Electoral College that, Brigadoon like, appears once every few years to select a president, all to avoid leaving the decision purely in the hands of the voters. Perusing the elaborate apparatus, writers have found all kinds of nooks and crannies from which to upset the election process. Gore Vidal chose the nominating convention as the setting for his splendid succession story, The Best Man. In his lively novel Dark Horse, the conservative activist Ralph Reed used an upstart third party to sow chaos in a presidential election. The commentator Jeff Greenfield's novel The People's Choice turned on what would happen if a winning presidential candidate died during the vaguely regulated period between the elections and the certification of the Electoral College. Kevin Spacey has been having fun with his TV series...