Elections in the United States: How to resolve in case of a tie

If the presidential elections in the USA – the result of which several hours after the polls closed this morning was a mystery– they will lead to equality in the number of electoral delegates, Congress will be responsible for resolving the situation, which would be exceptional and which has only two antecedents in more than two centuries of history.

The United States votes indirectly, since voters nominate in each of the 50 states that make up the Union delegates who, later, to the Electoral College, will carry the mandate given to them through the ballot box.

The same system governed in Argentina until the first election of Carlos Menem in 1989, since the constitutional reform of 1994 ended the electoral college and introduced direct voting.

the The Electoral College in the United States is made up of 538 members (the sum of 435 deputies, 100 senators and three delegates from Washington DC) which are distributed among the states according to the population of each of them, so that whoever gets 270 delegates will ensure victory.

The number of electoral votes each state receives is equal to the number of senators and representatives it has in Congress. For example, California, the most populous state, has 55 voters and New Hampshire only four.

The candidate with the most votes in a state is the one who wins all the voters, so in practice winning the popular vote does not always lead to victory: in the 2016 election, the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, got three million more votes than Donald Trump in the general count at the country level, but the Republican secured victory by winning – albeit by a narrow margin – in states with the most delegates.

Since the number of delegates varies by state, In one of the many mathematical combinations, it may happen that the number obtained by each party, Republican and Democrat, is the same. In other words, there would be equality in the number of voters.

In this case, in which obviously neither party would have a majority of the delegates, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes that the decision to elect a president goes to Congress, since each state delegation to the House has a voice. The Senate would be the body responsible for electing the vice-president, in this case Mike Pence or Kamala Harris.

This has only happened twice in the country’s history. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of votes elections in 1801, when Burr was competing for vice-president, under the procedures in force at the time. Congress made Jefferson the third US president after 36 consecutive votes, Spanish newspaper El Mundo recalled.

In 1825, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson also failed to secure an absolute majority electoral votes. On that occasion, the House elected John Quincy Adams, the sixth to hold the post, as Speaker, despite Jackson getting more popular votes.

Source: Telam