Songfacts®:

• Alice Cooper released this song a few months before the US presidential election of 1972, a contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. To stir up publicity, Cooper announced that he was actually running for president, and this song outlined his platform: "We're gonna rock to the rules that I make."
  
  He did get some votes, but Richard Nixon won that one.
• This is a re-write of an earlier Alice Cooper song, "Reflected," off the Pretties For You album in 1969. The two songs have completely different lyrics, but are musically similar. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Kyle - Slatington, PA
• Mocking politics was a good strategy for Cooper. "We always tried to do things that infuriated parents because we thought that would be the fastest path to getting their children to like us," his manager Shep Gordon said.
• Cooper revived this song every presidential election year, always announcing that he was running. In 2016, he took it a step further, posting his platform on votealicecooper.com. His campaign slogan: "A Troubled Man for Troubled Times."
  
  Some of his campaign promises:
  
  Adding Lemmy to Mt. Rushmore
  No more pencils, no more books
  Ban on taking selfies, except on a designated National Selfie Day
• When he performed this song in concert during election season, Cooper would have bloody versions of the candidates come out and battle.
• This is one of the few Alice Cooper songs with composer credits going to the entire band: Cooper, guitarists Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce, bass player Dennis Dunaway, and drummer Neal Smith.
• Cooper doesn't really want to get elected. "That would be my hell," he told Ian Fortnam in 2000. "I hate politics, but there's something about social fiction and social fact that's fascinating. I don't care about taxes or all of that crap, what I do care about and Alice cares about, are the extremities of violence in this society. Alice has his boundaries, his violence is very choreographed and it always happens to him. He always gets his comeuppance, gets his head cut off and pays for his sins, but then comes back with a white top hat and tails and it's party time."
  
  Fortnam then suggested that this was not unlike US President Bill Clinton. Cooper replied: "Yeah, he just gets away with everything and it's amazing. The guy just smiles right through it, he's an amazing character."
• Mojo magazine commented that as an apolitical person "Elected" was a strange song for Alice Cooper to record. He replied:
  
  "Really, it was just us saluting The Who, their big riffs. And everyone hated Nixon so much at the time - they hated Nixon more than they hate Trump, and that's what we were tapping into. Who's the most unlikely person to run for office? Alice Cooper."
• This song got John Lennon's vote. He declared it "a great record." Alice recalled:
  
  "He'd come in every day and listen to the acetate, saying, 'I love this record.' He was very political whereas we weren't in the least political. But the record was such a great satire on at all. John told me he loved the power of it, and what it said and it was a perfect time for that record. Though he said Paul (McCartney) would have done it better - well, duh - of course."