Shiva Ayyadurai has a very interesting political story to tell. He was born in 1963 in Bombay (now Mumbai) “a low-caste untouchable in India’s caste system” and moved with his family to the United States and a better life when he was seven years old. He graduated with an undergraduate diploma in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, where he holds advanced degrees, according to his bio, including a PhD in biological engineering.
He claims to have invented email and was reportedly briefly married to television star Fran Drescher.
Now Ayyadurai wants to be president of the United States. But he can’t. While he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1983, he’s not a natural-born U.S. citizen — one of three requirements to be president. It’s clearly spelled out in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Ayyadurai has spent much of his campaign fighting that restriction with what one constitutional law expert describes as “bizarre” legal arguments. And, strikingly, some state election officials seemingly don’t know or care about the citizenship qualification that Americans have abided by for the better part
