How is the president elected if the electoral vote ends in a tie or no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes?
As this recently updated article discusses, while extremely unlikely, given the way this timeline is going it's possible the electoral college ends in a tie. Nate Silver projects this as a .3% possibility.
Things to think about:
Only about half of the states require their electors to vote for the person that won their state. Who are the electors? Generally no one you know.
If there's a tie, the House elects a president and the Senate elects a VP. Sub-consideration: it is the composition of the House and Senate after the November election that makes those determinations.
This would all technically be decided on January 6th. And you remember how that went last time.
Regardless, it's highly unlikely this will happen. Still, this would be utter and complete madness. There is literally a non-zero chance we have a Trump/Harris administration. š¤£
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Pay particular attention to the EC votes assigned by Congressional District in Nebraska and Maine.
In the event of a 269-269 tie, it would only take one faithless elector to flip the whole thing.
Faithless electors is a whole deal... Good novel on the subject here:
I didn't even think about those two apportioned states. Yikes.
Novel sounds interesting, I've never heard of it.
Basic premise is there's an election and the winner dies before the Electoral College votes can be counted. So who wins?
Is it the VP candidate, who got 0 electoral college votes, or the other candidate who got some but less than 270?
Is there an answer to that? Or would that be another Bush v Gore?
Oh, man, it gets INCREDIBLY complicated.
From a purely Electoral College perspective, you have to have 270 to win. So it boiled down to the electors in each state.
But there aren't really any laws REQUIRING electors to vote for who their state wanted and, in the case of death, that's kind of out the window anyway.
If nobody gets to 270, it goes to the House where it's one vote per state.
Is there an answer to that? Or would that be another Bush v Gore?