(NewsNation) — The race for the White House between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains in the too-close-to-call category, which has created scenarios in the minds of some political junkies about both presidential candidates receiving an identical number of Electoral College votes in next week’s election.
The 12th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that presidential and vice presidential candidates win a majority of the votes of the 538 electors appointed to represent the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
That puts the number of electoral votes required to win the election at 270. A tie of Electoral College votes has never taken place in modern history. However, some scenarios exist in which Trump and Harris could each finish with 269 Electoral College votes, although such a possibility is remote, according to NewsNation partner Decision Desk HQ.
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As part of its forecasting models, Decision Desk HQ runs tens of thousands of simulations each day, the organization’s president, Drew McCoy, said. However, the outcome of a tie in the Electoral College happens “incredibly infrequently,” McCoy told NewsNation.
For example, for a tie to occur next week, in three of the simulations run by Decision Desk HQ, Harris would need to win Nevada in two of the scenarios, Arizona in all three of the scenarios, and could never win Michigan and Pennsylvania, McCoy said.
NBC News reported that another scenario for a tie exists if Trump were to win all of Nebraska’s Electoral College votes. To do so, the former president would have to capture the state’s 2nd Congressional District, which many pundits say favors Harris.
But McCoy said for that to happen, several other states would have to fall into place for the 269-269 scenario to play out. McCoy said that Trump could still reach 270 electoral votes by maintaining his 2020 map and then picking up Georgia and Pennsylvania.
While Decision Desk HQ’s forecasting allows for the possibility of Trump and Harris each finishing with 269 Electoral College votes, the scenario remains highly improbable, he added.
“It’s like winning the lottery kind of a thing,” McCoy told NewsNation. “It’s possible, but it’s probably nothing that you plan on.”
He added: “It’s not a high probability event, but it’s not an impossible one.”
Images of Trump and Harris by the Associated Press
If neither Trump nor Harris was to reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, the 12th Amendment calls on the U.S. House of Representatives to elect the new president while the U.S. Senate would appoint a new vice president. The procedure of a “contingent election” has not taken place in the case of a U.S. president since 1825 (John Quincy Adams) and 1837 for the vice president.
Yet in an election cycle that saw the presumptive Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, drop out of the race in favor of Harris, questions of what could happen next have arisen. That includes the notion of an Electoral College tie, McCoy said.
In a contingent election, the House of Representatives would choose between up to three candidates that won the most electoral votes, according to the Congressional Research Service. Each state would cast one vote for president regardless of its population. The agency said that in states where two or more U.S. Representatives are seated, that group would need to determine which candidate would receive that state’s voice.
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Although such a scenario has piqued the interest of those who delve deeply into election night possibilities, McCoy said that Decision Desk HQ’s simulations very rarely land on a tie. Out of millions of simulations, an Electoral College tie comes up perhaps a handful of times, he added.
On election night, Decision Desk HQ, the first organization to accurately call the past two presidential elections, works to understand the possibilities but deals much more in data that comes out of each state, McCoy said.
As someone who digests the numbers his organization turns out daily, McCoy says he is intrigued by the idea of the Electoral College vote tie. But based on the way the numbers are pointing in a race that remains anyone’s with just days remaining, he prefers to deal with reality.
“It’s intriguing as a thought experiment, certainly,” McCoy said. “But if (a tie) were to happen, I think we would all be very surprised.”
