I was today days old when I learned that if an American election ends in an exact tie, the thing that decides it is frequently not a recount, a runoff, or a judge. It’s a bowl. Or a deck of cards. Or a coin. In January 2018, Virginia’s 94th House of Delegates district finished at 11,608 votes to 11,608 votes, and the State Board of Elections resolved it the way you’d settle who does the dishes: they wrote each candidate’s name down, dropped the names into a ceramic bowl, and pulled one out. Republican David Yancey’s name came up, and he won the seat. Source: CNN.
A Ceramic Bowl Decides a Legislature Seat
The part that makes the Virginia draw more than a trivia answer is the context: a single House of Delegates seat was in play, and a tied race in that one district is what sent the whole thing to a bowl. Twenty-three thousand people voted, the two candidates split them exactly in half, and the deciding “vote” was a slip of paper picked blind by a board member. That’s not a quirk of 1890s frontier politics. That’s 2018, in a state that borders Washington, D.C. Source: CNN.
The King of Hearts Beats the Six of Hearts
Virginia at least kept things dignified. Cave Creek, Arizona did not. In 2009, two town council candidates, Thomas McGuire and Adam Trenk, tied at 660 votes apiece. The town judge produced a deck of cards from a cowboy hat and had each man draw one. Trenk pulled the king of hearts. McGuire pulled the six of hearts. Trenk took the seat, and somewhere a six of hearts is responsible for a man not holding elected office. Source: CNN.
Florida Needed a Hat, a Coin, and Ping-Pong Balls
Then there’s Neptune Beach, Florida, which in 2014 managed to turn one tied city council race into a three-stage game show. First, a name was drawn from a hat to decide which candidate got to call a coin toss. Then the coin toss decided who went first in a drawing. Then a drawing of ping-pong balls set the final order. Three rounds of chance, stacked on top of each other, to break a tie that no number of extra ballots was going to resolve. Source: CNN.
The Coin Toss That Didn’t Know the Winner Was Dead
The strangest one is in Alaska. In 2006, a local school board election ended in a tie and was broken by a coin toss, which is already a lot for a school board. The problem was that the winner had died on Election Day itself. The coin didn’t know that, and neither did the law, which had a process for a tie but nothing that accounted for one of the tied candidates no longer being alive. Source: CNN.
How Rare Is This, Really?
Rare enough that each of these stories is a story. A study covering 1898 through 1992 found zero federal elections that ended in a tie, and only one race in that entire span decided by a single vote: New York’s 36th District, in 1910. At the state legislative level, before 2018 only two general elections had ever ended in an exact tie: a 1978 Rhode Island state Senate race, which was resolved with a special election rather than a coin flip, and a 1980 New Mexico state House race, which was resolved with a coin flip. Virginia’s 2018 bowl draw joined that very short list. Source: CNN.
So if tonight’s returns feel agonizingly slow, take some comfort: at least nobody is reaching for a cowboy hat yet. Probably.