It is often said that one vote wins, one vote loses, but when more than 160 million voters vote, as is expected to happen in the United States, the possibility of the two candidates obtaining the same number of votes is practically zero. However, since in the United States an electoral college elects the President and this electoral college is formed from majorities obtained state by state, it is not impossible for a tie to occur. In fact, it has already happened – and three times: in the elections of 1800, 1824 and 1836.

In these 2024 elections, practically no scenario of division of the “undecided states” points to the hypothesis of a tie between 269 main electors (this is how the members of the electoral college are designated). The most often talked about hypothesis is that one of Nebraska’s districts votes for Trump and not Harris, as should happen; This is because Nebraska is one of only two states where the big voters are not all attributed to the candidate with the most votes. This attribution of 100% of the main voters to a candidate, even if he won tangentially, as happened in 2000 in Florida, in the famous dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush, is the so-called “winner takes all”. ”. ruler.

But in the unlikely event of such a tie, what is expected is that the House of Representatives will elect the new President and the Senate will elect the new Vice President. But before we continue explaining how this happens, let’s remember what happened in the past.

Three elections decided in Congress

In the elections of 1800 the rules were different than today. At that time, each member of the electoral college had two votes and whoever got the most votes in the electoral college was president. In this election, John Adams, the sitting president, and Thomas Jefferson, who was his vice president and had been the defeated candidate in the popular vote in 1796, were again competing in the election. At that time, the dispute was between federalists and. democratic republicans.

In these elections both parties also presented a candidate for vice president, competing with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Problem: When the electoral college votes were counted, both Jefferson and Burr received the same number of votes, 73. The decision was passed to Congress, which surprisingly had to repeat the vote 36 times before confirming Jefferson.

This first tie gave rise to a constitutional amendment, passed in 1804, that began to distinguish the vote for president from the vote for vice president in the electoral college.

Hence the problem in 1824 was already different. Four candidates competed that year, all from the Democratic-Republican party, and none won a majority of voters. The top candidate was Andrew Jackson, but when the vote moved to Congress, the second-place candidate, John Quincy Adams (son of John Adams), made a deal with the fourth-place candidate and was elected. President. Andrew Jackson would consider this maneuver a fraud, leave the Democratic-Republican party and found a new party that is the origin of the current Democratic party. Jackson, whom many today consider the first Populist candidate, would later be elected in 1828 and 1832, serving two terms as president.

The third time a decision had to be passed to Congress was in the 1836 election, when a portion of Virginia’s delegates refused to vote for the vice president, forcing the Senate to intervene.

A December surprise?

Since then, it has never been necessary to turn to Congress to break a tie in a race for the presidency or vice presidency, but this latest example from 1836 reminds us that not all delegates elected by the states are formally required to vote according to the rule that All supervoters in a state give their votes to the candidate with the most votes in that state. In fact, in 2016 there was even a super voter from the State of Texas, curiously a Republican, who refused to vote for Donald Trump in an election in which this did not change anything, since he had a comfortable majority in the electoral college. .

In other words, at the limit it could happen that we have a very close result in the electoral college, 270 delegates against 268 for example, with the simple change of vote of just one of the supervoters creating a tie. Unlikely? Undoubtedly. But let’s imagine that one of the candidates has an advantage in the electoral college but lost the popular vote and one of the supervoters chooses to follow… the indication of the popular vote.

By the way, it should be noted that there have already been five presidential elections in the United States in which the elected president was not the one who received the majority of popular votes: it happened in 1824, in 1876 (elections that reopened the civil war), in 1888 (that year it was New York State that decided the election, and by a very narrow margin), and more recently in the 2000s in 2016.

There was also an election, that of 1880, in which all records for a close election were broken: the difference in the popular vote between the two candidates was only 0.1%, and in the State of California the difference was of only 94 votes.

How a tiebreaker would work in 2024

However, we go back to 2024 to try to understand what will happen if there is a tie in the electoral college and the decision goes to Congress.

Unlike what happened in the 19th century, in which Congress only assumed its functions in March, the next Congress should assume its functions on January 2, 2025, that is, even before meeting to ratify the results, which which will occur on January 6.

That is, if there is a tie, the new Congress will decide who will be the next President, in what is known as a “contingent election.”

And how does Congress decide?

In the case of the House of Representatives, which would have to elect the new President, the vote would not be representative by representative, but State by State, which is also an originality, with each State having one vote. This could mean an advantage for Trump, since the Republicans could even lose the small majority they currently have in the House of Representatives, but if we count state by state this is unlikely to happen.

For the vice presidency, the Senate will vote and then it is difficult to know what could happen, since the Democrats may lose their majority in this election; In fact, surveys point to this, but surveys are just surveys.

Well seen and analyzed, it is not impossible that this system gives us a President from one party and a Vice President from another party, it is enough that there are different majorities in the two chambers of Congress. It is perhaps the most unlikely – and least realistic – scenario of all, but at a time when all scenarios are open or it is best not to rule it out.