11/03/2010

In the event of a tie in the 2012 Presidential Election...

...the House of Representatives votes, state by state, for the President. This means that if Great Plains were a state with 1 congressperson (Democrat), that person would presumably back the Democrat. If Metropolis were a state with 31 representatives (16 Republicans and 15 Democrats) then assuming party lines hold, that's one vote for the Republicans.

Here's a chart showing how this looked before the 2010 elections:



With a few results pending, the picture has changed:



The upshot of this is that if the Electoral College result (remembering that the distribution by states will change by 2012) produces a dead heat (269-269 for example) then right now it would mean a Republican President and a Democrat Vice President (the Senate gets to vote for the Vice President in this scenario).

2 comments:

Rich Rostrom said...

Yabbut since the XXth Amendment, each new Congress starts on 4 January, while the Presidency starts on 20 January.

Thus there is two weeks for the new Congress to elect a President (if necessary).

While there is no explicit clause in the Constitution or any statute declaring that the new Congress would elect - that is clearly the intent of the XXth Amendment.

This was not true before the XXth Amendment. The two elections decided by the House (1800 and 1824) were both decided by the old House.

If the election of 1860 had gone to the House, there was a distinct possibility of deadlock in the House. In that case, the Senate's choice of Vice President would take office. The chosen man would very probably have been Sen. Joe Lane (D-OR), who had been Breckinridge's running mate on the pro-slavery Democrat ticket.

This possibility was used by Republicans in 1860 to get votes for Lincoln. It was suggested that the choice before the public was "Lincoln or Lane".

Antoine Clarke said...

An anonymous person wrote a comment, but embedded a lot of spam links in it so I rejected it.

I consider the following to be utter rubbish, but respect the right of nasty, silly people to talk trash, so I reproduce it below:

"The 9/11 truth is out on the internet
This is the truth: The WTC was destroyed by 3 underground thermo-nuclear explosions. They were detonated by the US government which used this as an excuse to lead the US and its allies into invading Afghanistan and Iraq. All these wars and deaths were based on a lie.

Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”"

First, I doubt if Goebbels actually would have ever said such a thing. The oldest records for this quote state that it was translated into German from English. In fact, Goebbels is well known to have OPPOSED the use of crude propaganda techniques and favoured subtle tactics. He would have loved Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell.

Second, I saw 9/11. Anyone wishing to fabricate stories about Jews, nuclear bombs or George W Bush as planning the attack can go to hell.