2024 US presidential elections: What happens if Trump, Harris tie? - explainer

The 2024 US presidential election is almost here, and with it the fate of arguably the most powerful nation in the world. 

Both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are racing to see who will make it into the Oval Office, and most experts agree that this election is going to be neck and neck. It's anyone's game, and anything can still happen.

But what if that means a tie? What if, by some measure, neither Trump nor Harris manage to get a majority of the electoral votes needed to win the election? What happens then?

Sure, this scenario is highly unlikely - but it is far from impossible. 

Here's an explainer about what happens if Trump and Harris tie, if the election is contested, and how previous instances of this have been resolved. 

What is the Electoral College?

To understand how US elections work, it's important to understand the bedrock the entire presidential election is based on: the Electoral College.

Founded at the start of the US and enshrined in Article II of the Constitution, the Electoral College system sees each state, plus Washington DC, choose electors who will vote for the president. Each state, generally speaking, assigns electors however they wish and generally give their votes to reflect the popular vote of their state. 

In other words, if a Republican wins the popular vote in a state, all those electoral votes would go to them, while a Democrat victory would see the electoral votes going to the Democrat.

This system was only chosen after all other options were ruled out during the drafting of the US Constitution. Founding Fathers James Madison and Edmund Randolph had proposed for Congress to elect the president, but this was ruled out because it would violate the separation of powers by giving too much power to the legislative branch. Another proposal was for a simple direct election the president, with the people each having a vote of their own and therefore every vote matters. 

However, this was never going to be accepted by the southern slave-owning states, as the population there was heavily skewed due to the prevalence of slaves who couldn't vote. 

But this also reflected another population-based issue that was a major part of how the US government system became structured. Smaller states such as Maryland and Connecticut, home to smaller populations and smaller areas of land, would never be able to have the same level of population as larger states like New York and Georgia. Because of that, they were worried that if a legislative branch assigned representative power based on state population, they would always have less influence than larger states. However, a legislature assigning equal representation to states would be problematic in its own right, giving disproportionate power to smaller states and their residents, thereby making one vote in a small state mattering more than one vote in a larger state. 

The compromise on this issue was a bicameral Congress, with the House of Representatives being population-based and the Senate giving equal representation to each state. Slave states were further appeased with the three-fifths compromise, which saw three-fifths of each state's slave population be counted for their total number of congressional representatives and their power in the Electoral College, though this was repealed in the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. 

This was at the heart of the Electoral College being chosen, because since slaves weren't allowed to vote, slave states would have inherently less voting power if the presidency was determined solely by popular vote. By using the three-fifths compromise, each slave state would have greater voting power. 

Another reason why electors were chosen was ostensibly as a bulwark against corruption and mob voting. The idea was that electors, being intelligent and educated officials, would be knowledgeable about politics and would be able to chose the better candidate should the general public have been misled by clever campaigning. And since the constitution explicitly states that electors cannot hold federal office, it was believed that they would not be under the influence of any of the candidates and could instead be chosen by the people. 

Each state has electoral votes in proportion to their representation in both houses of Congress. This means each state has a guarantee of at least three electoral votes, two for both senators and one for a member of the House of Representatives. States that currently have just three electoral votes include those with much smaller populations such as Alaska and Wyoming. Washington DC, despite not being a state and not having representation in Congress, is also given three electoral votes as part of the Twenty-Third Amendment of 1961.

In practice, this has had its issues and the current system today has undergone changes that have arguably warped how it was intended to be.

Electors are largely chosen by either primary voters or at party conventions. Further, candidates are guaranteed by law to win all electors of a given state should they win the entire state, with the sole exceptions of Nebraska and Maine. In addition, while electors were once able to vote against the will of the state's residents, that has since changed. Now, electors pledge to vote for their parties, and 33 states have laws on the books guaranteeing that electors vote for their parties instead of becoming "faithless electors." Very few electors have ever actually done so, and almost half of all who have did so because the original party candidate died prior to the election. However, 2016 was a notable case where 10 electors either attempted to or succeeded in going against their party's choice. 

How do presidents win the electoral vote?

Currently, there are a total of 538 electoral votes. The states with the most electoral votes are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, which have 54, 40, 30, 28, 19, and 19 respectively. To win, a president needs to have at least 270 electoral votes.

Many of the states have very firmly established demographics and tend to definitively lean Republican or Democrat. California and New York, for example, have long been solidly Democrat states, while Texas and, in recent years, Florida have been solid Republican strongholds. 

Geographically, more rural states and the South tend to vote Republican, while the West Coast, New England, and Mid-Atlantic, tend to vote Democrats. Other regions such as the Southwest and Great Lakes often swing either way. 

Smaller states tend to be the focus of more campaigning as even those states can make a difference. However, the big focus is on swing states.

Also known as battleground states, these ones have their overall leanings in question and could theoretically go either way. 

Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are currently the biggest battleground states and can realistically make or break the election. 

But with the current election set to be neck and neck, the two most important states to focus on are arguably going to be Maine and Nebraska, the two that can split up their votes.

What happens if no one wins a majority in the presidential elections?

There have been instances where no one candidate achieved the necessary majority of electoral votes to become president. When this happens, the fate of the election is in the hands of Congress in what is known as a contingent election. 

The members of the House of Representatives vote among themselves on who of the candidates should become president, while the Senate votes on who should become vice president. Crucially, this would not be the Congress from before the election, but the one elected that election. As such, it technically takes place the following year, after the new Congress is inaugurated. The Constitution outlined how this should work, but it was modified in the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.

This has happened only three times in US history, each with different outcomes. 

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied and the winner was chosen by a contingent election, where influential figures such as Alexander Hamilton helped tilt Congress in favor of Jefferson. 

In 1824, the election was split between candidates Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, with Jackson having won the popular vote. However, Congress voted in favor of Adams, who promptly appointed Clay, who was speaker of the House at the time, as secretary of state in what Jackson and his supporters referred to as a corrupt bargain. 

The election of 1836 was far more unusual as the problem was not with the presidential election but the vice presidential candidate, when 23 electors in Virginia went against their pledge to back Richard Mentor Johnson, thrusting the Senate into a contingent election, where Johnson won.

Since then, there have been no contingent elections, but while unlikely to occur again, it is not out of the realm of possibility.

One contested election that could have become a contingent election was in 1876 when multiple electoral disputes emerged several electoral vote slates were sent by Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana over result disputes and a separate smaller electoral dispute in Oregon. 

Overall, this led to 20 electoral votes being disputed, rather than it being a tie or no one getting a majority. Congress formed a largely bipartisan committee to allocate the 20 votes to either Republican Rutherford B. Hayes or Democrat Samuel Tilden. Infamously, Hayes, who lost the popular vote, was given the electoral votes and ultimately won the election.

How can the presidential election end in a tie?

While neither Maine nor Nebraska are swing states, both states allocate electoral votes differently from the rest of the country. Unlike the other states, where all electoral votes go to the candidate who won a majority of votes in the state, Maine and Nebraska allocate electoral votes based on congressional districts. This means that each congressional district can get its own electoral vote, though two electoral votes would always go to the winner of the state's popular vote due to two electors representing the Senate, not the House of Representatives. 

This is significant because while states do drift solidly Republican or Democrat when taking into account the entire popular vote, congressional districts are more directly representative of those who live there, meaning a district in a solidly Republican state can still lean Democrat. 

This is true in most US states, with California and New York having Republican-leaning congressional districts and Texas having Democrat-leaning ones, for example. 

However, those only matter in presidential elections when it comes to Maine and Nebraska, and those are going to be the states to look out for. 

Maine has four electoral votes total, which means two of them are up for grabs based on congressional districting. Nebraska has five, meaning three electoral votes are up for grabs. 

Both states have had split electorates before. In 2008, one congressional district in Nebraska voted for Democrat candidate Barack Obama rather than Republican John McCain, who won the rest of the state's votes. Maine split in 2016, when Donald Trump managed to win the electoral vote of one of its districts. 

Both states also had split votes in 2020, though they effectively canceled each other out at the time.

It is possible, though unlikely, that the vote could be split again. And with the race neck-in-neck, one stray electoral vote could make all the difference.