Weird Election Scenarios-- Edwards de facto POTUS for 2 years???

Factual Questions
1

From <a href=“MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos”>This MSNBC Article</a>

:confused:

I don’t understand how this would work… someone please enlighten me. Why would it be Edwards, and not the Speaker of the House?

2

Dangit. Sorry for the wonky HTML. I was up all night worrying about weird election things. And the crying baby had something to do with it too.

3

The scenario is thus: Since the Electoral vote is tied, the selection of the President devolves to the House of Representives , and the selection of the Vice-President devolves to the Senate, as per the Constitution. If the House fails to select a President by Jan 20th (pretty unlikely IMO, the House is, and will remain, solidly Republican), but the Senate elects John Edwards as VP (also pretty unlikely, unless the new Senate changes parties), then on Jan 20th, since no President has been selected (but a Vice-President has), the Constitution also provides that the Vice-President elect Act as President until a President shall have been selected by the H of R (this is dictated the 20th amendment I believe).
As I said, its pretty unlikely that the House would fail to choose a President from the period of time from Jan 3rd (when they count the Electoral vote) to Jan 20th (when the new President’s term would begin).

4

But why would that scenario mean that Edwards would be president for two years. Couldn’t the House of Representatives vote after January 20?

5

** Dewey Finn[\b], they could. I suppose the argument is that the H of R could become so deadlocked that they give up trying to select a President until a new Congress is elected. Again, It’s very unlikely to happen.

6

There’s no legal reason. The House will not change composition until then, that’s all.

7

While the scenario is still extremely unlikely, one factor that might make it a touch more plausible is that voting in the House in the event of an electoral tie is by state delegation. So each state’s representatives vote within their state delegation, then that state casts one vote for it’s choice. This could cause chaos in evenly split or closely split Congressional delegations. Potentially wavering Representatives on both sides would be the subject of fierce lobbying to break with their party’s man, particularly if their state went overwhelmingly for the other guy.