Constitution

• 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

• UVU students and faculty began partnering with the University of Oxford on the Quill Project in 2015 to digitally model the United States Constitutional Convention.
• The new $350,000 grant will help Quill complete its “50-in-10 Project,” which aims to digitize the constitutional conventions of all 50 states by 2030.
• Students at Pembroke College and UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies have provided significant research for the project.
• “The Center for Constitutional Studies and its students have been instrumental to the testing and development of the Quill Project,” said Cole.

• INDIANAPOLIS, May 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. Marine Corps veteran Rodney K. Rolland today was appointed National Adjutant of The American Legion, the nation's largest veterans service organization.
• Having served as Assistant National Adjutant from May 1, 2022, until his new appointment, Rolland also led and worked in the Human Resources Division at National Headquarters for more than 17 years.
• The adjutant is the administrative head of the organization, overseeing National Headquarters and all other national offices.
• The adjutant administers the policies and mandates of the national convention and the National Executive Committee.

• ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Society of Military Comptrollers (ASMC) is pleased to announce an extension and update to the charter of its Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform Task Force.
• Key responsibilities of the Task Force include:
  Interfacing with executive and legislative branch agencies and committees to gain insights into the progress of PPBE reform and the implementation of the PPBE Commission's recommendations.
• This combination of new and existing members will enable the Task Force to bring fresh ideas and continuity to the reform process.
• For more information about ASMC or the PPBE Reform Task Force, please visit www.asmconline.org or contact Charles McEntee, Director of Marketing and Publications at [email protected] .