How (Not) to Break an Election Tie by David Leonhardt

Topic: How (Not) to Break an Election Tie

Writter:  David Leonhardt

Publish Date: 22 December 2017

Published on : The New york times

How (Not) to Break an Election Tie

David Leonhardt

Our country is bad at breaking ties.

The overtime rules in both hockey and football are a mess. (Here’s a better solution for football.) Now comes word that the state of Virginia is going to decide an election — and, by extension, control of its Legislature, for goodness’ sake — by a random drawing.

Election officials and judges have spent weeks scrutinizing ballots in the statehouse race, with the lead shifting between the Republican incumbent, David Yancey, and the Democratic challenger, Shelly Simonds. The Democrat seemed to have won on Tuesday, only to have a three-judge panel judge allow one disputed ballot (a photo of which was obtained by The Virginian Pilot on Wednesday) and create a tie. The two candidates each have 11,608 votes.

There are no perfect solutions here. But there are better ones than allowing important matters of state policy to be determined by a random draw, as Virginia law requires. “When it comes to elections, America is still living in ancient times,” Christal Hayes of USA Today writes. “Ancient Greece also used similar methods to break ties.”

An abiding principle in any tiebreaker should be to reduce the role of luck, and a random drawing clearly does not. One way to minimize luck is to find a merit-based way to break the tie and choose a winner. The other way is to accept the tie and divide the winner’s prize as evenly as possible.

In the case of a tied election, the merit-based solution would be to redo the election, which would be time-consuming and complicated. But there is a fairly easy way to divide the winner’s prize evenly.

My modest proposal: Yancey and Simonds should each be awarded half of the two-year term that Virginia legislators typically have. The random draw, scheduled for Dec. 27, would still be held, with the winner receiving the choice between serving the first year of the term or the second.

Then, presumably, the two candidates would fight out a rematch in November 2019. It would be a much fairer solution than the one Virginia is using.

The Russia investigation. Much of Washington’s focus is on whether President Trump will fire Robert Mueller. But firing Rod Rosenstein, Mueller’s boss, may be the bigger risk, the former F.B.I. agent Asha Rangappa writes at Just Security. A replacement for Rosenstein “not fully committed to the rule of law but to insulating the president and the White House from political and legal accountability could wreak havoc,” she explains. Such a replacement could obstruct or end the investigation.

In The Times, the lawyers Richard Painter and Norman Eisen lay out Trump’s other nefarious options for disrupting the investigation.

Tax calculators. Curious about how the new tax law will affect you? The Washington Post, the Tax Policy Center and The Times have created calculators. An important caveat: These calculators only estimate tax cuts for 2018, and the tax plan changes over time, with diminishing benefits for the middle class and poor.

A sad day at The Times. Janet Elder, a longtime newsroom leader and behind-the-scenes force, died on Wednesday, at the too-young age of 61. You can read her Times obituary or my own recollections of Janet.