Ron Paul Will Save The Day!

...or not.

There's an article on the Huffington Post about how hilarious, though admittedly awful, an Electoral College tie would be. It's a scarily plausible scenario, honestly, because this is a really plausible map:

That's basically the Kerry states plus New Mexico, which is looking like a virtual lock at this point, and Ohio, where Obama's numbers have held up really well. It feels like this is an actual stopping-point on a uniform-swing analysis, where you shift the margin in each state by the same amount at the same time. In other words, this could happen, on an admittedly pretty bad night for Obama. And it's a 269-all tie ballgame map. Which is scary, because Republicans are almost certain to control a majority of the House of Representatives delegations next year, even if they don't control the House which, if we've had a tied Presidential election, let's be honest, they will.

Now, one quirky thing about this is that even in a tied Presidential race year, the Democrats could actually hold onto the Senate, or at least keep at least 50 votes in it. And it's the Senate, not the House, that picks the Vice President in case of a tie. And, well, that would get us a Romney-Biden Administration, possibly with Joe Biden getting to cast the deciding vote in his own favor. But, well, the VP has no formal legal responsibilities, so except insofar as he would give the Democrats a half-vote's extra maneuvering room in trying to block Romney in the Senate, it wouldn't matter much.

But the thing I found most hilarious about that article is the fact that some Republican electors are, apparently, Ron Paul devotees, and are seriously considering acting as "faithless electors" and voting Ron Paul instead of Mitt Romney. The rhetoric about how the Founders didn't design the Electoral College to just mimic a popular-vote contest is pretty delicious as well. So we could get Obama 269, Romney 267, Ron Paul 2, or some such. Except the problem is, as amazing as it would be for faithless Ron Paul elector to hand Obama the elector, it doesn't work like that. If Ron Paul were actually running in the election and managed to pick off a few EV's, say by winning Alaska, and make it 269-266-3, we'd still go to the House, and they would still be able to do whatever they wanted, namely elect Romney. You need to get an outright majority. If Ron Paul were running and, miracle of miracles, gobbled up a whole bunch of states, so that it was something like 250 Obama, 200 Romney, 88 Ron Paul, it would be the same story. Once Obama doesn't win 270 EV's outright, the only thing that can save him is a sufficient number of faithless electors swapping from Romney to Obama himself. And, uh, I haven't heard any suggest that that's going to happen. If Romney wins 270 or 271 EVs on Election Night, however, Ron Paul's forces of darkness could turn it into a no-outright-majority scenario and send us to the House and the Senate, but that would probably only result in Joe Biden getting to stand around doing nothing for a while.

A pity, because the world in which this was how Obama won the election would just be such an awesome world to live in.