It’s rare, but it has happened before…
There’s a chance, no matter how small, that Tuesday night might not be the end of the American Presidential Election 2016 after all, and the nightmare will roll on for another couple of months.
It may surprise you to hear, but due to the Electoral College voting system, the US President is not chosen by the voters, but by the electors that people in a state vote for.
The bigger the population of a state, the more electors the state has. For example, North Dakota has a population of 739,482 and therefore is given three Electoral College votes, but Texas has a population of 25 million people and as a result has 38 Electoral College votes.
There are 538 electors in total, made up of 435 members of Congress, 100 Senators and the three electors appointed to the District of Columbia.
Whoever gets the majority 270 electoral votes required first will win the election. Nearly every state will give all its Electoral College votes to whoever tops the voting in the state. Regardless of their margin of victory.
But if neither candidate receives a majority due to third party candidates or there’s a tie of 269 Electoral College votes apiece, the election could drag on longer than this week.
But if there was a tie, the power of appointing the next President will fall on the shoulders of Congress. The rules of the process are dictated by the 12th Amendment of the American Constitution.
“If no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the president from the three presidential candidates who received the most electoral votes,” the National Archives explains. “Each state delegation has one vote.”
But even then, as each state gets one vote in the House of Representatives, there’s a chance that the voting could end up tied at 25-25.
If a deadlock is not broken in the House of Representatives by Inauguration Day, the Vice-President elect will assume the role of President until the deadlock is broken.
The last time any candidates failed to reach a majority in the Electoral College voting was in 1824.
In this election, FiveThirtyEight predicts there is a 1.6 percent total chance of either a tie at 269 electoral votes or some other variation of a deadlock.
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