What exactly happens if both Bush and Kerry get 269 electoral votes? The way I read Article II, a delegation from each state made up of that state’s Congresspeople elects the president, while the Senate elects the VP. Am I reading the Constitution correctly?
Assuming I’m not reading it incorrectly, what I’m wondering is when the House and Senate would make those elections. It probably wouldn’t occur until after the electoral college results are officially submitted to the President of the Senate. Would the new Congresspeople (elected next week) take part, or the outgoing Congress?
And the real meat of my question, in the event of a tie and the afformentioned House delegation and Senate elections, could, for example, Bush and Edwards be elected President and VP, respectively?
By the way, this seems like something that would have been asked here already, but I searched and couldn’t find such a thread. Sorry if it’s already been covered.
I think it has been covered here before. The new congress would meet and elect a speaker. Vice President Cheney will preside over the Senate until his term is up on Jan 20 2005. The electoral votes will be delivered to the House in January and VP Cheney will open and count them. If there is a draw, or no majority, the House will elect the President and the Senate will elect the VP. A majority of the state delegations will probably be Republican and Bush would be elected.
The Senate, however, could be interesting. If there is a 50/50 split, I don’t know what would happen. VP Cheney has no vote when the Senate elects the new VP. Kerry should be able to take his seat as he is still an elected Senator.
We could have a President Bush and Vice President Edwards. Sen. Lincoln Chafee may very well bolt the Republicans if such a scenario were to happen.
The 12th amendment states that, “if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.”
Dick Cheney isn’t a senator. It’s my assumption that that means he wouldn’t be able to vote, since a “majority of the whole number” (of Senators) are necessary.
As for how it would actually work out…who knows. It’s never come to that before (I don’t think).
The first thing that would happen would be a horse-race among electors to try and pick off a few from one party to vote for “the real winner” (the one with a popular vote majority.)
Assuming the electors stayed faithful to their parties, it’s the incoming Congress (the one that begins January 3) who gets the electoral vote opened and certified in their presence. So the makeup of the House and senate might be a little different than it is right now.
At this point, it gets a little weird, as the elections of 1800, 1824 and 1876 attest. While each state gets one vote for President in the House, and one vote for Vic-President in the Senate, there’s no clear rule for how that one vote gets determined. By a majority of the members from that state? By unanimous vote of all the members in that state?
And it gets better. Since the Constitution says that if no candidate has a majority, the House shall choose from the five highest candidates. Does that mean that the Greens, Libertarians and Constitutionalists would also be eligible, even if none of them got any electoral votes? If, say Ralph Nader got one lonely electoral vote somewhere, could he then be in a position to ask his elector to vote for another candidate, making Nader the power broker?
The House picks from the top three winners of the electoral vote note the popular vote. And if Nader were to get s single electoral vote it’d probally be from a faithless elector since other wise he’d need to win a plurality in a congressional district in Maine or Nebraska. Each state delegation’s vote in the house is decided by a majority vote of it’s members, so if it had an even number it wouldn’t be able to cast a vote.
And in the Senate each state gets two votes for VP since each state has 2 Senators. They vote independantly of each other. Oddly the Senate picks from the top 2 rather than the top 3.
If the House of Representatives has not chosen a winner in time for the inauguration (noon on January 20), then the Consitution specifies that the new Vice President becomes Acting President until the House selects a President. (If the winner of the Vice Presidental election is not known by then, then under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Speaker of the House (or President pro term, or senior cabinet Secretary) would become Acting President until the House selects a President.)
Well if we get a tie in the House as well, Alex will give one final answer and each candidate will have 30 seconds to write down the question.
The answer: $3.
Bush will quickly write “the price of gas next month.”
Kerry will try to write down that riddle about the three men who paid $10 each for a $25 room.
Both will be disqualified. Bush because he didn’'t make his a question and Kerry ran out of time while explaining the role of the bellhop.
Nader, who was only permittted to play the home version, will be declared the winner by default , with the question:“How much should I spend on my next campaign for President?”
But if there’s no president yet, then is there a cabinet from which to find the next in line for succession? Which begs the quesion: how far down on the list am I?
Cabinet secretaries have no set term of office. Usually they collectively resign on Inuaguration Day but if there was no president by then they’d probally stay in office. It’s not likely that either the Speaker or President pro term would want to be Acting President since they’d have to resign from Congress first and presumably the House would still be trying to elect a President.
Martin Van Buren won a majority of Electoral votes, 170 out of 294, and thus became President. However, his running mate, Richard Johnson of Kentucky, was less successful.
Van Buren hadn’t wanted Johnson at all. He wanted William Rives of Virginia. Outgoing President Andy Jackson, however, didn’t like Rives and favoured Johnson, who had been one of Jackson’s strongest supporters in Congress. The Democratic convention chose Johnson, but there were some shenanigans involved, as the Senate biography of Johnson indicates:
In addition, Johnson was heavily rumoured to be romantically involved with one of his female slaves, having fathered some children with her, which became part of the campaign:
As a result, Virginia cast all 23 of its Electoral votes for William Smith of Alabama. That mean that Johnson had only 147 votes, one short of a majority. The candidate with the second greatest number of votes was Francis Granger, a Whig from New York. That cast the election of the Vice-President into the Senate, with the following result: