Tight race ups the ante on electoral college flukes

WASHINGTON – Could one of these electoral college nightmares be our destiny?

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry deadlock on Tuesday with 269 electoral votes apiece – but a single Bush elector in West Virginia defects, swinging the election to Kerry.

Or, Bush and Kerry are headed toward an electoral college tie, but the 2nd Congressional District of Maine breaks with the rest of the state, giving its one electoral vote – and the presidency – to Bush.

Or the Massachusetts senator wins an upset victory in Colorado and appears headed to the White House, but a Colorado ballot initiative that passes causes four of the state’s nine electoral votes to go to Bush – creating an electoral college tie that must be resolved in the U.S. House.

None of these scenarios is likely to occur next week, but neither are they far-fetched. Tuesday’s election probably will be decided in 11 states where polls now show the race is too tight to predict a winner. And, assuming the other states go as predicted, a computer analysis finds no fewer than 33 combinations in which those 11 states could divide to produce a 269 to 269 electoral tie.

Normally, such outcomes are strictly theoretical. But not this time, with the election seemingly so close and unpredictable. “Fluky things probably happen in every election but because most are not close nobody pays any attention,” said Charles Cook, an elections handicapper. “But when it’s virtually a tied race, hell, what isn’t important?” Cook says this election is on course to match 2000’s distinction of having five states decided by less than half a percentage point.

It is still possible that the vote on Tuesday will produce a clear winner of both the electoral and popular votes. But if the winner’s margin is small – less than 1 percent of the popular vote is a rule of thumb – the odds increase that the quirks of the electoral college could again decide the presidency and again raise doubts about a president’s legitimacy.

“Let us hope for a wide victory by one of the two; the alternative is too awful to contemplate,” said Walter Berns, an electoral college specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.

But many political strategists are preparing for a narrow – and possibly split – decision. Jim Jordan, former Kerry campaign manager now working on a Democratic vote mobilization effort, puts the odds at 1 in 3 that Bush will share the fate Al Gore suffered in 2000: a popular-vote win but an electoral loss. “It’s actually looking more and more plausible,” he said, citing a number of polls showing a Bush lead nationally but a Kerry lead in many battleground states.