A model of this story appeared in CNN’s What Issues e-newsletter. To get it in your inbox, join free here.
CNN
—
With two presidential candidates combating over a mere 538 Electoral School votes, a tie state of affairs is greater than doable. It’s truly sort of shocking there has solely been one tied election thus far, in 1800, between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
That tie was the results of a failure of coordination by Democratic-Republicans, however it led to the nation’s first “contingent election,” determined within the Home of Representatives.
Sure. Whereas a tie is just not a probable end result, it’s one thing to be prepared for. Right here is one believable state of affairs for the 2024 election:
If Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, wins Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada and a single electoral vote in Nebraska, all of which President Joe Biden received in 2020, however she loses Pennsylvania and Georgia, there’s a tie, 269-269.
The web site 270 to Win additionally has extra tied-election eventualities.
In contrast to each different state, Maine and Nebraska award two electors to the statewide winner and one to the winner of every congressional district. These particular person, aggressive electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska grow to be vastly consequential in potential tie eventualities.
Make your individual 269-269 state of affairs with CNN’s interactive election map.
If there’s a 269-269 tie, or if a 3rd social gathering or impartial candidate wins electoral votes and retains a candidate from reaching an Electoral School majority of 270, the following step is similar. It’s referred to as a “contingent election.”
In response to the 12th Amendment, enacted within the wake of that divisive 1800 election, if no candidate will get a majority of the Electoral School votes, the brand new Congress, which might have simply been sworn in on January 3, chooses the president. The Senate would select the vp.
In response to an evaluation by the Congressional Research Service, a contingent election would happen on January 6, instantly after members of Congress met to depend electoral votes and decided that no candidate had a majority.
There’s loads of data from that CRS report on this story. Whereas it dates again to 2017, it’s nonetheless a invaluable useful resource.
The nation would clearly be divided. Lawmakers may very well be torn between supporting their most well-liked candidate and the one their state’s voters most well-liked.
In a contingent election, the Home selects the president and the Senate selects the vp. Home members can solely select from among the many high three finishers within the Electoral School for president, and senators can select from among the many high two finishers for vp.
Moderately than voting as people, every state delegation within the Home would get one vote, though how the state delegations choose their most well-liked candidate is just not spelled out. A easy majority, 26 state delegation votes, would appoint the brand new president.
If state delegations within the Home didn’t choose a president by Inauguration Day, January 20, the brand new vp chosen by the Senate would grow to be short-term president. It’s doable the Senate may choose a vp when the Home is deadlocked, as a result of within the Senate every senator would get one vote.
If the Senate had not chosen a vp by January 20, the presidential succession plan within the twentieth Modification quickly takes impact. First in line after the vp is the speaker of the Home, at present Mike Johnson, though it may very well be a unique Republican or a Democrat if Democrats win a majority within the Home this November.
If the Electoral School already advantages smaller and extra rural states, the contingent election course of – by which every state, no matter inhabitants, has an equal vote – provides them an enormous benefit.
California and Texas get the identical say as Delaware and Wyoming in a contingent election. Plus, Washington, DC, which will get three votes within the Electoral School, could be minimize out of the contingent election.
There’s nothing to require state delegations to honor the winner of their state’s vote. And in carefully divided states, the leads to single seats, maybe decided by gerrymandered congressional maps, may swing a delegation’s vote.
Heading into the 2024 election, Republican lawmakers held a majority in 26 states, in contrast with Democrats, who held the bulk in 22, with ties in Minnesota and North Carolina. Republicans in North Carolina have modified the state’s congressional map, nevertheless, and it’s prone to have a majority-Republican congressional delegation in January. Republicans are prone to preserve their benefit subsequent 12 months, particularly if voters are so break up that they ship a nationwide tie on the high of the ticket.
In Arizona, for example, who’s to say {that a} potential majority of Republican members of Congress would vote for the Democratic candidate, even when Harris pulled out a slender win there? Would Alaska’s Democratic member of Congress, assuming she wins reelection, vote for the Democrat for president regardless that her state is prone to go for Trump in November?
It’s truly meant to be an enchancment. The best way the Electoral School was first assembled, electors voted for 2 candidates. Whoever bought essentially the most votes was president and whoever bought the second-most votes was vp.
By the point political events have been forming – Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in 1800 – electors wanted to coordinate to solid extra votes for his or her presidential choose than their vice presidential choose.
Within the 1800 election, a rematch of 1796, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans beat incumbent President and Federalist John Adams.
However the Democratic-Republicans have been poorly coordinated or dangerous at counting and foolishly solid equal numbers of votes for his or her presidential choose, Jefferson, and his operating mate, Burr.
Out of pique, when the early model of the contingent election rolled round, the Federalists, who nonetheless managed the Home at the moment, backed Burr. Regardless of the intervention of Alexander Hamilton, a famous Federalist, it took 36 rounds of voting to lastly elect Jefferson.
By 1804, the twelfth Modification was being ratified.
Sure. In 1824, a number of candidates bought votes within the Electoral School however none of them acquired a majority, triggering a contingent election.
Amazingly, from right this moment’s perspective, the entire candidates who bought Electoral School votes that 12 months have been from the identical Democratic-Republican political social gathering, though they have been break up into regional sects.
Andrew Jackson received 40% of the favored vote and bought essentially the most votes within the Electoral School with 99 of the 131 wanted for victory. However the Home in the end picked his high rival, John Quincy Adams, whose father misplaced that 1800 election.
Jackson would have his revenge with a victory 4 years later, and John Quincy Adams would spherical out his profession as the one former president to be elected to Congress, the physique that made him president.
One other contingent election occurred with the 1836 race, however only for vp. Virginia’s electors didn’t like Robert M. Johnson, the operating mate of election winner Martin Van Buren, and withheld their votes for him within the Electoral School. The Senate later elevated Johnson to the vice presidency in a contingent election.
In 1876, when there was a contested end result, the contingent election system was bypassed.
That 12 months, on the peak of Reconstruction, the difficulty was not that no particular person bought a majority within the Electoral School, however quite that three Southern states – Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina – despatched a number of slates of electoral votes to Washington, DC, after the state elections have been disputed. And in Oregon, there was a dispute over one elector.
Congress created a particular bipartisan fee, with another Republican than Democrats, to find out which candidate ought to get the 20 disputed electoral votes. They in the end gave the votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes regardless that Democrat Samuel Tilden bought extra fashionable votes.
Hayes then largely ended Reconstruction, maybe as a part of a secret deal that gave him the White Home.