With four days to go to an election that every poll suggests is too close to call, political scientists in the United States fear a new quirk that could threaten the country’s embattled electoral system: a tie.
An exact draw is possible because the president is not chosen by popular vote, but by 538 electors in the electoral college. The electors are chosen by each state and there are many ways George Bush and John Kerry could end up with 269 electors each. In fact, according to a new computer analysis quoted in the Washington Post, there are 33 different permutations that could make that happen.
Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said an electoral college tie remained ”the rarest of outcomes”.
But this year, the country is braced for the unusual, and if the election is a draw, Schaller warned: ”Look for stark raving mad chaos for about a month.”
Richie Robb, a mild-mannered Republican mayor of a West Virginia town, could find himself at the centre of the furore.
His party has nominated him as one of West Virginia’s five electors if the president wins the state. But he says he is not sure he wants to vote for Bush.
He has already come under intense Republican pressure to toe the line but he told the Guardian on Thursday he was holding firm to his indecision.
”I’m still undecided. I have some problems about voting for President Bush. Starting a war in Iraq was the wrong step in the fight against terrorism. And then tax cuts that help the rich and not the moderate earner … ” But Robb added that he was also unimpressed by Senator Kerry.
If Robb refuses to cast a vote for either candidate, Senator Kerry could win the electoral college by 269 votes to 268, but not before Robb was subjected to the most intense pressure from the White House. He said he was aware of the prospect. ”We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he declared.
Alternatively, a potential tie could be broken in Maine, one of only two states that splits its four electoral votes according to the election result there, rather than on a winner-takes-all basis. The other state that does that is Nebraska, which is solidly Republican.
Assuming that, after all the legal wrangling, the electoral college is still tied, the constitution stipulates that the president should be chosen by the House of Representatives, and the vice-president by the Senate.
Bush should win a House vote, as there are far more Republican-dominated state delegations than Democratic ones. But if John Kerry wins the popular vote, as Al Gore did in 2000, a decision by the House of Representatives to award the election to Bush would trigger fierce protests. ”It will be a constitutional crisis,” Schaller said.
The first impressions of what that crisis may look like are already apparent in Florida, where election officials declared themselves baffled yesterday by the whereabouts of tens of thousands of absentee ballot papers.
Broward county, one of the focal points of the recount drama in 2000, said it would resend at least 20 000 ballots by overnight mail, and by courier if necessary, after complaints suggesting that up to 58 000 forms might never have arrived after being posted on October 7 and 8. The county’s deputy elections supervisor, Gisela Salas, said the problem had been ”beyond our control”, but the US Postal Service also denied responsibility.
”Let’s just hope it’s not a close election,” said Walter Berns, an expert on the electoral college at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If we have a replay of Florida 2000, with all these lawyers all over the place, it will undermine the legitimacy of the Constitution.” – Guardian Unlimited Â