Washington- The US presidential election is won by the candidate who receives 270 or more votes out of the 538 Electoral College votes.
Each state has a number of votes proportional to its population and reflects the number of its representatives in the two chambers of Congress: senators, with two for each state, and representatives, with a number of representatives that reflects the state’s population. Wyoming, for example, has one member in the council, while California has 52 members.
As a general rule, the winning candidate receives a majority of the state's votes with all its representatives in the Electoral College. The exceptions to the rule are the states of Maine and Nebraska, whose districts are divided by a number of votes in the Electoral College.
Although it is very unlikely that the presidential elections will end in a 269-269 tie in the electoral college, this is theoretically possible, and the chances of it happening may increase, especially with the approaching results of all opinion polls between the Democratic candidates, Kamala Harris, and the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
Harris and Trump receiving 269 votes means that neither of them received enough electoral votes to become president. This did not happen in American history except once, in 1800, then the “Democratic Republican” Thomas Jefferson was elected the country’s third president after defeating former President John Adams.
What does the constitution say?
If this year's elections end with this result, the American Constitution has a plan to resolve it. Legal experts point to Article II of the Constitution, as well as the 12th Amendment, in how to confront this situation.
If a tie occurs, the presidential election moves to the House of Representatives, where the newly elected members of the House must take the constitutional oath and then vote on who becomes president. Here, each state gets one vote, regardless of the size and number of its representatives, and they must vote for either Trump or Harris.
The Constitution stipulates the need to obtain a majority of delegations in the House of Representatives, meaning 26 delegations in the House (50 states + Washington, D.C.).
In this case, Republicans have an advantage because the party now controls 26 delegations in the US House of Representatives (according to the majority of state representatives in the House), and Democrats control 22 delegations, while the states of Minnesota and North Carolina have divided their delegations. Of course, everything could change depending on what happens in this year's general election.
Also, in the event of a tie, the choice of the vice president moves to the Senate, and here each member of the Senate gets a vote, instead of one vote for each state as is the case in the House of Representatives. The candidate who receives 51 votes becomes vice president.
Because these are separate votes, it is possible for the president and vice president to end up being from different political parties.
Assuming that Harris wins the three blue wall states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), and a seat in Nebraska, in addition to winning all the states that Biden won in 2020 with the exception of the Sun Belt states, Harris will receive 269 votes in the Electoral College, which means a tie, as Trump will get Also on 269 votes, including one from Maine.