Palpatine in '08

[Kevin]

If that law extends to obvious invalid candidates, it might require some adjustment, I'd say. Then again, it seems that some voters are quite content with it, since it gives them some extra 'opportunities'. And in using it, they help to keep the practice in existence. But my question was how common this is. Do most Americans perceive this as normal practice?

It probably does require adjustment, but again, it is far from common. This was the first case in the history of the US that someone was voted into the Senate posthumously. Though I believe it happened 3 times with people in the House of Representatives, and as I recall one of those cases was people of that district doing so as a form of protest.

The law about changing the ballot may need to be looked at and modified, but it's actually there as a form of protection not some kinda of odd loophole. The law doesn't really care about the reasons why you would want to change the ballot. There are lots of reasons, legitimate and not. People used to change ballots to put a candidate on it that had a name very similar to another candidate in order to try and pull votes away from the one, etc.

Another reason for laws that don't let you change ballots more than X time from the election is because of absentee balloting. You don't want people who for whatever reason (say they are over in England for 4 months but are still a US citizen) to be voting on candidates that are on a ballot that suddenly isn't the same as what the folks voting at the polls are voting on. On and in the case of Aschcroft v Carnahan, anyone who had voted before Caranahan died was issued a new ballot with the option to vote again or stay with their original absentee ballot.