The Exponent


11-02-2004	Previous edition: 11-01-2004

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What about a tie?

By Brent Forgues
City Editor

If the presidential race ends with a tie in electoral votes, U.S. citizens could live under the administration of a Republican and a Democrat.

Jon Teaford, a professor of history, said if President Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, and Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, both garnered 269 votes from the Electoral College, the final decision would fall upon Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives would choose the president and the Senate would select the vice president, he said.

Teaford said that although it's difficult to determine who the House would select for president, the Republican majority in the Senate would seemingly choose Dick Cheney, the Republican vice presidential candidate. So if the House goes Democratic, the nation could be led by a John Kerry and Dick Cheney administration.

"I've never realized that before," he chuckled, "but it does seem possible."

There has never been a split-party administration in the United States' history. However, there have been instances where the decision of choosing the next president has fallen upon Congress.

Teaford said Congress has had to select the president twice in its history: during a tie in the 1800 election and during the election of 1824 when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of votes, but not the majority. Instead, the House elected John Quincy Adams as the next president.

And this year it could happen again.

The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll reports that 49 percent of likely voters will choose Bush and 47 percent will vote for Kerry, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The dead heat in the polls could foreshadow another Congressional intervention for the 2004 elections.

But Michael Morrison, a professor of history, said the same worries came up over the originally predicted closeness of the 1996 presidential election and the likelihood it would end up in Congress' hands.

"I think they would probably agree that there is some desire for unity and symmetry," Morrison said. "You would not have Bush as president and Edwards as vice president or, God help us, Kerry and Cheney."

But instead of relying on the hopeful consensus within Congress to choose candidates from the same political party, Morrison said the race could turn simply on the turnout of young adults.

This race is so closely contested that it pales in comparison to the 2000 election, he said, and it will depend on young kids who are energized and involved because of the war in Iraq, their own futures in the economy and the rising cost of higher education.

"I'm a geezer. I don't think it's so much about me; it's more about you all," he said. "I cannot think of an election where young folks and college students and people of your age had such an impact on the election." Printer-friendly version