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• Commentators and observers are concerned about the possibility of a tie in the November 2024 presidential election.
• One possibility is that both major-party candidates end up with 269 electoral votes – one short of the 270 required to claim victory.
• In recent decades, election ties have happened all over the country and have been resolved through bizarre, often comical procedures.

Strange tiebreakers

• In June 2009, candidates Thomas McGuire and Adam Trenk tied in the race for a City Council seat in Cave Creek, Arizona.
• The town judge pulled a deck of cards from a cowboy hat, shuffled it and asked McGuire and Trenk to draw.
• Other election ties have been resolved by drawings out of a top hat and a tricorn hat.

A range of rules

• The rules for tiebreaking differ from place to place.
• In all cases, the course of action is either random, left to personal or political whims, or starts the election process over from the beginning.

More than half the votes?

• One of the most bewildering sets of tiebreaker rules applies to the nation’s biggest election, the one for president of the United States.
• As initially set out in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the winner of a presidential election must win more than half of the Electoral College votes.
• But if nobody gets a majority, which at present is 270, the decision goes to the House of Representatives.
• First, according to the 12th Amendment, the House can choose from the top three finishers in the electoral vote count.
• These parallel processes mean that the House could elect a president from one party while the Senate elects the vice president from the other.

Ending in a tie

• After Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each received 73 Electoral College votes, the 16 states of the Union voted 36 times to elect one of them but ended in a tie themselves.
• But Jefferson and Burr had been running mates, not opponents, so the result highlighted a complication in the original Constitution.
• Andrew Jackson, who ran as a political outsider, won the popular vote and more electoral votes than the other three candidates, though not a majority.

A key weakness in US elections