Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.


In case of a tie — or any scenario with no candidate winning a majority of electoral votes — the House of Representatives picks the president and the Senate chooses the vice president, and, yes, they could come from different parties. The House’s contingency election gives each state one vote, meaning Wyoming and Vermont have the same impact as California and Texas.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

This year, a contingency election would almost certainly result in a victory for Trump — Republicans have held a majority of congressional delegations for many years, including when Democrats won more seats in the House. This unrepresentative tiebreaker would probably occur after a Harris popular vote victory, further underscoring the deep flaws of this system.

Of course, the chances are low the election gets “thrown to the House” — it has occurred only twice,the last time exactly 200 years ago. But even if rare, the presidential contingency mechanism impacts our politics on a regular basis.

In a democracy it should be possible — and desirable — for new parties to emerge and to challenge the status quo with policy alternatives and new leadership. But in the United States a new party faces the near certainty that its presidential candidate would throw the election to an undemocratic vote in the House or “spoil” the election by “stealing” votes from a politically similar candidate. Facing such prospects, alternative political groups often stay on the sidelines, as No Labels decided to do this year. And if parties aren’t competing for national leadership, they’ll lack the stature to compete for other major offices as well.

There are many other significant hurdles to creating strong third parties in the U.S. such as first-past-the-post elections for most public offices,anti-fusion laws and stringent ballot access requirements. Together these forces have made the United States a rarity in the democratic world. We are the only country where no new party came to power in the 20th century. Even countries like England, France and Canada that — like us — use single-member districts for the legislature have more than two parties seriously contending for power.

Our completely binary politics starves voters of a range of choices — for president, and on down the ballot. Perhaps more dangerously, binary politics fuels the vilification of opponents and the competing versions of truth that increasingly dominate our national narrative.

Removing disincentives to new party formation is a critically important goal requiring a range of reforms. This presidential season it is worth focusing on the part that the presidential tiebreaker plays. The vast majority of countries with directly elected presidents have a two-round runoff system, providing citizens the opportunity to consider new parties and enabling greater innovation and dynamism in the party system.

France is a case in point. Amid widespread political dissatisfaction, almost a dozen candidates contested the first round of the 2017 French presidential election. The surge of support for Emannuel Macron’s new Renaissance party carried him to the presidency and catalyzed a paradigm shift in French politics. The runoff rule was critical in allowing this to happen.Studies in Latin America likewise find that presidential countries using a runoff election score higher on formation of new parties and on overall democracy — as runoffs encourage moderation and give victors the “legitimacy of majoritarianism.”

We too can do this. Proposalsto amend or abolish the Electoral College have circulated for two centuries, and an amendment calling for a direct popular election with runoff nearly passed in 1970. A current modification that would not require an amendment is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would ensure a majority of electoral votes for the popular-vote winner, ending the risk of an election thrown to the House. Ranked choice voting (which is often called “instant runoff voting”) is another path to reducing the risks of the Electoral College contingency mechanism.

In 1992, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proposed an amendment maintaining the Electoral College but establishing a second round if no candidate reached an electoral vote majority. Arguably, we could fix many of the system’s flaws by taking McConnell’s amendment and adding to it a requirement that states allocate electors proportionally rather than by winner-take-all, which would greatly expand the number of competitive states. That approach would keep the Electoral College, which many conservatives will fight hard to protect — not a perfect solution but perhaps a feasible one.

When McConnell introduced his amendment, it was Republicans who’d likely lose a thrown-to-the-House election since they controlled fewer state delegations. That’s a valuable reminder that both parties can be threatened by undemocratic Electoral College rules. Similarly, in 2004 George W. Bush came close to being a popular vote winner and Electoral College loser, and it’s certainly possible that a Republican could suffer that fate in a future election.

The challenges are huge and the record of failed attempts daunting. But we can find new ideas, alliances and motivation from understanding how the Electoral College hurts our politics on a regular basis. Addressing once and for all the archaic Electoral College is a critical step in building a robust and innovative democracy for the 21st century.

Read More

Voter registration

In April 2025, the SAVE Act has been reintroduced in the 119th Congress and passed the House, with a much stronger chance of becoming law given the current political landscape.

SDI Productions

The SAVE Act: Addressing a Non-Existent Problem at the Cost of Voter Access?

In July 2024, I wrote about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act when it was first introduced in Congress. And Sarah and I discussed it in an episode of Beyond the Bill Number which you can still listen to. Now, in April 2025, the SAVE Act has been reintroduced in the 119th Congress and passed the House, with a much stronger chance of becoming law given the current political landscape. It's time to revisit this legislation and examine its implications for American voters.

Read the IssueVoter analysis of the bill here for further insight and commentary.

Keep ReadingShow less
Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries
person in blue denim jeans and white sneakers standing on gray concrete floor
Photo by Phil Scroggs on Unsplash

Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries

With the stroke of a pen, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham enfranchised almost 350,000 independent voters recently by signing a bill for open primaries. Just a few years ago, bills to open the primaries were languishing in the state legislature, as they have historically across the country. But as more and more voters leave both parties and declare their independence, the political system is buckling. And as independents begin to organize and speak out, it’s going to continue to buckle in their direction.

In 2004, there were 120,000 independent voters in New Mexico. A little over 10 years later, when the first open primary bill was introduced, that number had more than doubled. That bill never even got a hearing. But today the number of independents in New Mexico and across the country is too big to ignore. Independents are the largest group of voters in ten states and the second-largest in most others. That’s putting tremendous pressure on a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

Getty Images, Grace Cary

Stopping the Descent Toward Banana Republic Elections

President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.

Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Vote" pin.
Getty Images, William Whitehurst

Most Americans’ Votes Don’t Matter in Deciding Elections

New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.

“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”

Keep ReadingShow less