Here’s a quiz: It’s election night, and the country has just selected its next president, but the vice-presidential candidate has just recently died. Who will serve as vice president?

(A) Alan Alda
(B) Nicholas Butler

Because you’ve just returned from your recess vacation, I will be generous and accept both answers.

• (A) Alan Alda. Couch potatoes who have been watching “The West Wing” saw Democratic candidate Jimmy Smits elected president, but his vice president, played by the late John Spencer, had died just before the polls closed. Smits won a clear victory, so he will become president Jan. 20 after the electors cast their votes for him in December and Congress counts the votes in January.

But how will the vice president be selected? There are three options.

First, party leaders could coalesce around a replacement and publicly encourage the electors who were to vote for Spencer to vote instead for someone new. Oddly enough, there are “West Wing” hints that Alda, the losing Republican presidential candidate, may be Smits’s choice for VP. Leaving aside the wisdom of such a unity ticket, this is the simplest scenario because the loyal Democratic electors would probably follow the wishes of their party leaders. But there could be legitimacy questions about a VP choice who was not selected by voters or confirmed by Congress.

A second option would be to let the electors cast their votes for the deceased VP. Congress would count the votes and declare the deceased VP to be elected. Then on Jan. 20, when the president took office, the vice presidency would be vacant and the president could nominate a new VP who would have to be confirmed by the Senate and the House.

A third case is that the Democratic electors are divided or confused. Some vote for the deceased VP, and some vote for Alan Alda. This could mean that no VP candidate has a majority of electors, so the Senate would have to pick from the top two vote getters of the deceased VP, Alan Alda or the losing Republican VP candidate.

This scenario reminds of Horace Greeley, the presidential candidate who lost to Ulysses Grant in 1872 but died before the presidential electors cast their votes. The electors were divided, but it did not matter, as Greeley was on the losing ticket.

• (B) Nicholas Butler. Those who do not watch “The West Wing,” or who remember the 1912 election, will remember that Taft’s VP candidate, James Sherman, died shortly before Taft was elected. After the November election, Republicans urged their electors to vote for Butler, who went on to become vice president.

The point of all these scenarios is to highlight the complicated intersection between elections, death and presidential succession. Far worse would be a terrorist attack where the winning presidential and vice-presidential candidates were killed after the popular vote was cast but before the electors had cast their votes. Would the American people accept a president who had never faced the voters but had been selected by party leaders as a replacement?

Even messier scenarios could be dreamed up if the deaths occurred after the electors cast their votes but Congress had not yet counted them, or if something happened on Inauguration Day, or the elections themselves were disrupted, or if candidates died in the midst of a contested election.

Not every contingency can be addressed, but most of presidential succession is governed by statute and would not require a constitutional amendment. Nearly five years after Sept. 11, Congress should revisit presidential succession so that TV does not become reality.

Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.