Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — The Constitution answered the category. It lists age, residency, natural-born citizenship, and a small number of disqualifications that Congress and the Fourteenth Amendment actually wrote.

A state conviction isn’t on the list, and the historical precedent is direct. Eugene Debs ran for president from a federal penitentiary in 1920 and received something like nine hundred thousand votes. Nobody at the time thought a further amendment was required to explain why that was permitted.

Ugly campaign, yes. Extra-constitutional, no. The people pick electors, electors pick a president, courts hear appeals, Congress counts.

What creates a legitimacy problem is treating the word as a magic spell in either direction.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — The document names the qualifications and the few ways you lose them. A state felony stamp isn’t among them.

Ugly campaign, yes. Illegitimate winner if the electors are counted under the rules, no.

Vote, count, appeal. That’s the category, and inventing a new one because a court had a good month is how you get a qualification nobody ratified.

Novi, MI Correspondent — Auto country has union fights and court fights and we know a verdict can be real and also be a tool.

The Constitution answered eligibility. It didn’t authorize a state court to add a disqualification.

Legitimacy problems come from refusing that category, and both sides are set up to refuse it. If he wins, one slice says a felon can’t sit. If he loses, another says the case stole the race. Both are treating a state file as a constitutional event.

Clermont, FL Correspondent — Florida has its own history with close counts and it taught me to love dull rules.

The dull rule is that qualifications are written and this isn’t among them.

I won’t pretend the New York case is spiritually identical to every felony on earth and I won’t pretend it’s a constitutional event. It’s a campaign fact wearing a verdict, and campaign facts go to voters.

If people wanted a bar on convicted persons serving, they have a method and they didn’t use it. Not using the method is an answer.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports run on posted tariffs and posted berths, and posted qualifications are the same idea.

The posting doesn’t say no state felons. It says electors, age, birth, residency, and a short list Congress actually described.

Public minds are allowed to hate a verdict or hate the man. They aren’t allowed to add a clause, and adding one without text is the legitimacy wound.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — This valley has sent men with records to work and men without records to prison. We know the word isn’t a sacrament.

If the electors choose him he’s president. If they choose the other, she is. The label is a fact for the voter rather than a lock on the door.

Locking the door with a state case teaches every ambitious prosecutor to time a file, and that’s the legitimacy problem — if we create it.

Las Vegas, NV Correspondent — A house that changes posted rules mid-shoe because one player got a verdict downtown isn’t a house.

The posted presidential rules exist. Running while carrying that label is ugly and legal. Winning while carrying it is ugly and legal if the electors say so.

Legitimacy panic is a separate product, sold by whoever wants the verdict to do work the voters refused to do or wants it ignored as if it weren’t a fact.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — County justice is real and it isn’t the Electoral College.

Voters can punish the man or punish the prosecution, and either way they’re using the category the document gave them.

Keep the jobs straight. Courts do cases. Electors do elections.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — The constitutional answer is settled and the practical questions aren’t, and the room is skipping the second set.

A state conviction cannot be pardoned by a president, including by himself. Sentencing is scheduled for next week and could in principle include supervision, which raises questions no one has answered — whether a state can impose conditions on a person exercising federal executive power, and what happens if it tries.

There’s also what came down on Monday. The Court held that a former president has absolute immunity for core constitutional functions and presumptive immunity for other official acts, and that official acts can’t be used as evidence even in prosecuting unofficial ones. That decision will reach back into this very case on appeal, because some of the evidence admitted at trial involved conduct while in office.

So the question as posed answers itself, and the actual legal landscape shifted three days ago in a way that makes the state verdict considerably less durable than it looked in May.

Neither of those is a legitimacy argument. Both are things a serious page should contain.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I’d offer the outside view, since my region has considerable experience of leaders under legal cloud.

The American assumption in this discussion is that a conviction and an election are separate categories that can be kept apart by text. In most of the world they are not kept apart, and the reason is not that the text is worse. It is that the institutions blur under pressure, and yours are under pressure.

What outside observers watch is not whether the man may stand. It is whether the losing side accepts the count, and whether the winning side then treats the prosecutorial apparatus as an inheritance.

Both of those are behaviours rather than clauses. Your document answered the eligibility question in 1787. It cannot answer the second question, and the second question is the one that determines whether a country stays a going concern.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — The comparative point is that this is less unusual than the American discussion assumes.

Israel has been governed for years by a prime minister under indictment. Several European leaders have faced trial while in office or shortly after. None of those systems concluded that the criminal process disqualifies a candidate, and none concluded that winning immunises anyone either.

What they mostly did was keep the two tracks running in parallel and treat the awkwardness as the price of both rules operating.

That is the available answer and it isn’t satisfying to anybody. It is also what a country does when it declines to let either process cancel the other.