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Standing up, so you mean something big is about to happen. it's a very close race. it's a very very close race. one of the consequences is that it is entirely possible that at the end of all this the president of the united states is going to be john boehner. I'm not kidding.
Here's how this works. the process by which that could happen is not that hard to understand and it really could feasibly happen.
This is the battle ground map. the yellow states. the states that are red or blue is it seems clear that the states are going to vote. Let's assume there are not going to be any big surprises there in the non- battle ground states. that brings us to just the battlegrounds. those are the states in yellow.
So in this scenario, before we get to the battleground states, President Obama, just from adding up the blue states, has 237 electoral votes. That's even before we get to the battleground states in yellow. you need 270 to win.
So president Obama picks up Ohio, all important Ohio. Let's say he also wins new Hampshire, and let's say he wins the great state of Wisconsin.
But let's say mitt Romney wins all of the other battleground state on the map. this is not that hard to image. Romney would win Florida and north Carolina and Virginia and Colorado and Nevada and what I like to think of as the Iowa part of Ohio.
So if that happens on election day, look at what the electoral count is. that is a tie. 269 to 269. Neither of them is president in this circumstance. So how in this circumstance do we do side who wins the presidency?
Jonathan Carl from ABC News spun this out in print and we've been look looking at it ever since. It is not an accident what would happen in the case of a 269 to 269 electoral college tie. This is not something we would have to make it up on the spot. The founders talked about what would be the right thing to do in a circumstances like this. And it turns out what they thought was a very strange thing. so according to the 12th amendment, it's the house of representatives who gets to choose who is the president.
But, they do not vote on who's going to be president the way they normally vote on things in the house. In that circumstance, when they're making that specific decision, each state just gets one vote per state. So no matter how many members of congress there are from each state, no matter how big the state's population, each state gets an equal vote.
So in this scenario that get us to an electoral tie between Mitt Romney and President Obama, Mitt Romney wins more states. he wins 29 states to Obama's 21 states. Which means that if the house of representatives voted, Mitt Romney would be elected by the house of representatives. Nobody can instruct the state congressional delegations exactly how to cast their ballots, they get to decide on their own.
You would think they would vote the way their state voted and work it out in their own mini democracies or something. But if they did that the way their states voted, this is who we would end up with.
What if we ended up instead 25 states picking president Romney and 25 states picking President Obama. There is no tie breaker in that case. you know who becomes president in that circumstances? Not Mitt Romney, not President Obama, but this guy, speaker of the house John Boehner. That's who becomes president in the event of a 25/25 tie.
The more likely outcome in our electoral tie that got us here, is that there will be no tie in the house. Mitt Romney will be elected president in the house, but then what happens to the vice presidential tie?
If there's an electoral tie it goes to the house of represents we get president Romney and vice president Paul Ryan not automatically. This is the amazing part and it's on purpose. It didn't come up by accident.
The vice presidency would be decided in the senate after the presidency was decided in the house of representatives. So it's kind of nuts but look it how it works out. In the senate they would vote for a vice president in a straightforward way. One senate, one vote. We would be talking about the senate we would have after the election.
If it's a republican majority in the senate, presumably that republican majority would pick Paul Ryan.
If there is a democratic majority, that senate would presumably pick Joe Biden, right?
If the senate is tied at 50/50, in that case the sitting vice president would break the vote. So then we would have a process dictated by the constitution of the United States.
President Mitt Romney and vice president Joe Biden. Together. At once. That is a totally feasible prospect as an outcome for this election.
Isn't this a great country?
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