What If The Electoral College Is Tied?

The durability of the Constitution left to us by our brilliant founding fathers is a testament to their great wisdom. However, the convoluted system they created for electing a President has had to be amended several times and still leaves open numerous possibilities for mischief. They distrusted the wisdom of the average citizen to make a choice for President. As a result, Al Gore defeated George W Bush in the 2000 election by over half a million popular votes, yet lost the election because of the Electoral College.

 2000 was not the first time that the will of the people was overturned by an archaic contrivance for presidential selection. In 1824, 1876, and 1888 politicians selected the candidate who had  come in second as the winner, despite the choice of the voters.

The electoral college system is so convoluted that, in theory, a candidate could get no votes whatsoever in 39 states and Washington D.C., and win the remaining 11 states each by one vote and be elected President! And then, consider that electors can vote for whomever they choose, regardless of how the citizens of their states voted, and you can create numerous scenarios in which a president can be elected against the will of the people. This “faithless elector” scenario, in which the elector ignores the will of the people of their state has happened at least 85 times, as recently as the election of 2004.

With the 2012 elections looking very close at the moment, there are a number of  reasonable electoral college maps that could result in an electoral college tie. Throw into the mix the possibility of a faithless elector or two (say a disgruntled Ron Paul supporter) and the possibilities only increase!

So What Happens?

The procedure for breaking an electoral college tie is that the new House of Representatives would convene in January and elect the president. Each state gets one vote. Thus the one representative of Wyoming has the same power as the entire delegation from California. If they were to tie 25–25 (D.C. does not get a vote) they would just keep voting, theoretically endlessly, while the newly elected Vice President (see next section below) would become acting President!

As of now, it would appear that about 28 or so states will be controlled by a Republican majority. In all likelihood, they would vote to elect Mitt Romney as the president. But, hypothetically, what if Barack Obama carried North Carolina, but it’s congressional representatives were mostly Republicans? Or what if Mr. Romney carries Pennsylvania, but a majority of its house members are Democrats? Would public pressure force the members of Congress to vote in accordance with their state, or would party loyalty trump all? Nobody knows.

Vice President

The new Senate would convene and elect the Vice President. In all likelihood, the Democrats will retain control of the Senate by a narrow majority. Therefore, we could begin in 2013 with Pres. Romney and VP Joe Biden! If this is not confusing enough, consider the very real possibility that the Senate could be split 50-50, between Democrats and Republicans. How would they break the tie and select the vice president? The answer is that the president of the United States Senate would cast the deciding vote. The president of the Senate is the Vice President of the United States! Thus, under this scenario, Joe Biden would cast the deciding vote and elect himself as Vice President.

The Solution?

There have been numerous calls for the Electoral College to be eliminated and replaced by a straight popular vote. I’m sure that Al Gore would heartily endorse such a notion! But if we did that, and just to leave you with one more odd scenario to ponder, you could mathematically devise an election in which a candidate lost all 50 states and still won the election. It would work like this: candidate Smith wins in the popular vote of every state but does so by an extremely narrow margin in each. (We have had four Presidents who won the popular vote by less than 1 percent of the vote) and then won the District of Columbia by more than 200,000 votes, as  Barack Obama did in 2008. Candidate Smith would have won all 50 states and lost the election!