LITTLE ROCK — The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were nail biters, but statisticians say there’s an outside chance the United States will have an even closer contest this year.
A 269-269 Electoral College tie is improbable, but possible.
Allan Keiter, founder of the 270toWin.com website, runs 10,000 election simulations each evening based on current state-by-state polling data, and “lately, the tie scenario is happening about 1 percent of the time,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Earlier this month, statistician and computerized election simulations expert Nate Silver of The New York Times put the odds at six tenths of 1 percent. As of Saturday, the figure was four tenths of 1 percent.
Anytime a presidential election is close, there’s the specter of gridlock. The risk is higher on those rare occasions when a strong third party candidate - such as George Wallace in 1968 - manages to carry entire states.
This year, there are several routes that would lead to a deadlock on Election Night.
One scenario involves Republican Mitt Romney carrying the battleground states of Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Virginia and Florida, while President Barack Obama claims the battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.
Another is Romney winning Iowa, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin, while Obama finishes ahead in Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire.
The result in both cases: 269-269. The two scenarios assume that the president starts with 237 electoral votes from states some consider safely Democratic, while Romney’s base line is 206 votes from states that some view as leaning Republican.
It takes 270 votes to win in the Electoral College.
Electors won’t gather to cast their votes until Dec. 17 - 41 days later.
Arkansas’ six electors will meet that day, as required by state law, at 10 a.m. in the state Capitol building. Similar meetings will occur in statehouses across the country.
If Obama wins in Arkansas, six people - carefully selected by the state Democratic Party - will be entitled to vote. If Romney carries the state, a half-dozen well-trusted Republicans will have the honor.
In many states, including Arkansas, delegates aren’t required by law to vote for their party’s nominee.
So there’s always a sliver of a possibility that one or more of the voters will be “faithless electors,” casting their votes for a candidate who did not carry their state.
The votes are then forwarded to Washington, where they’re tallied during a joint session of Congress.
Robert William Bennett, a Northwestern University law professor and editor of Taming the Electoral College, says that could lead to mischief if the vote is extremely close.
“If on Election Night there appeared to be an electoral college tie, but the electors were not to meet for some forty days, there would likely be an attempt to court ‘faithless electors,’” Bennett said in an e-mail. “If the apparent outcome were put in doubt by attempted faithlessness, I would think there was a good chance that all hell would break loose at the counting session before the two Houses of Congress, particularly if the two Houses were controlled by different parties.”
If the Electoral College deadlocks or if neither presidential candidate gains a majority, then the House of Representatives will be responsible for picking the nation’s next chief executive.
The 50 state delegations would receive a single vote each. Deadlocked delegations would be recorded as “present.”
Currently, there are more states with predominantly Republican House delegations than with delegations dominated by Democrats.
Barring a sweeping and unexpected change in the House, “That’s pretty clear what’s going to happen. The Republicans are going to choose Romney,” said Michael T. Rogers, an Arkansas Tech University professor who helped write the book Electoral College Reform: Challenges and Possibilities.
But the Senate - where Democrats are currently in control - would choose the vice president.
Potentially, a President Romney could be paired with a Vice President Joe Biden until Jan. 20, 2017.
William Lucas, editor of the Journal of American Studies and a professor at the University of Birmingham, says a tie vote would be even more acrimonious than the 2000 Bush v. Gore battle.
“I would expect a lot of bitterness and point-scoring. Whoever ‘won,’ be it Obama or Romney, after a House vote, would find it even more difficult to govern than we saw in these last two fractious years,” Lucas said in an e-mail. “That could be very damaging.”
The odds, Lucas says, are long. “It’s a 1 in 100 chance but it’s possible,” he wrote.
There’s been a tie vote once before.
Under the original Constitution, each elector was entitled to cast two presidential votes. The top vote-winner would be president and the runner-up would be vice president.
But in 1800, the procedure led to paralysis.
Republican-Democratic Party standard-bearer Thomas Jefferson and the candidate tabbed for vice president, Aaron Burr, each received 73 votes from Republican-Democratic Party loyalists. (Incumbent President John Adams, a Federalist, had been eliminated after finishing third.) So the matter was sent to the House, which was controlled by Jefferson-loathing Federalists.
It took 36 ballots in the House before Jefferson was able to claim victory.
Soon thereafter, the nation passed the 12th Amendment, mandating that electors cast one vote for president and one vote for vice president.
The House has decided the presidency only one other time - in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote and the electoral vote, but fell short of a majority.
When the contest was sent to the House, representatives gave the presidency to John Quincy Adams.
Electoral College foes were enraged, and calls for change have sounded periodically since then.
As the nation struggled to rebuild in the wake of the Civil War, U.S. Sen. Oliver P. Morton, a 19th century Indiana Republican, warned that the “wholly useless” Electoral College could be America’s undoing.
“In the complex system of electing a president which we now have, contingencies may arise which cannot be foreseen which may lead to civil war and disaster,” he warned his Senate colleagues in 1873.
For most of American history, the Electoral College had an odd number of voters, lessening the chances of a tie vote.
But the 23rd Amendment, which awarded three electoral votes to the District of Columbia without giving it a seat in Congress, left the nation with 538 votes.
Since then, several Americans - many of them editorial writers - have fretted about the possibility of a tie vote.
In 2000, Time magazine warned that a 269-269 tie would “plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.”
Others say - tie or no tie - the Electoral College should be thrown on the junk heap of history.
In 1967, a special commission of the American Bar Association called the Electoral College “archaic, undemocratic, complex, indirect and dangerous.”
Over the years, several politicians have sought to modify the Electoral College or abandon it altogether.
Seeking a third term in the White House and running a long-shot third-party campaign, former President Theodore Roosevelt condemned the Electoral College in speeches far and wide.
In the 1950s, U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts Republican, introduced a constitutional amendment that would have made several changes in the Electoral College. In the event of an Electoral College tie, Lodge suggested, the presidency should be awarded to the candidate with the most popular votes.
But Lodge’s legislation languished.
Calls by President Lyndon Johnson to overhaul the system went unheeded in 1965.
In 1969, the House passed a constitutional amendment, 339-70, which would’ve eliminated the Electoral College. But filibuster threats doomed the measure in the Senate the next year.
State University of New York at Cortland political science professor Judith Best says Congress is wise to leave the Electoral College in place.
The current system allows an election to be decided fairly, “and quickly ... it gives a finality to it,” she said.
“We have to have a president. We can’t let that office go empty. ... Nothing is perfect [but] it’s a reasonable way to do it.”
After Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote in 2000, there were new calls for the Electoral College to be jettisoned.
But efforts to amend the Constitution didn’t go anywhere.
And it won’t go anywhere even if Romney and Obama are locked in an Electoral College deadlock, predicts Rogers, the Russellville government professor.
In the event of a tie, Rogers says, “There’d be a lot of initial public outcry about how the Electoral College needs to be eliminated or reformed. And then it would probably die out in a year, and nothing would be done. That’s what happened in 2000.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/29/2012