Prickly City by Scott Stantis for April 22, 2022

It’s not what people have in mind when they say money wins elections.

“After all this work,” Joanne Ferrary says, “It could come down to a coin toss.”

Ferrary, a Democrat running for New Mexico state house in the 37th district, is deadlocked with her incumbent Republican Terry MacMillan. Nearly two weeks after Election Day, the votes have all been counted, and each candidate has received 6,247 of them.

It’s one of the weirder traditions of American democracy: In many states, if a race is tied, a “game by lot”—cards, straws, or most often, a coin toss—determines who goes to the house and who goes home.

Months of campaigning, committee assignments, the fortunes of careers, the possibility of political change—it all comes down, like possession in a football game, to heads or tails.

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More recently, coin tosses have broken ties in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Florida, Minnesota and New Hampshire. South Dakota and Arizona have used card games. In Virginia, the winner has been chosen from a hat.

At the local level, it happens all the time. Earlier this month in tiny Kenton Vale, Kentucky, two candidates for city commission each received 28 votes. They were required by law to settle the dispute “by lot.” (A duel is expressly forbidden by the state’s constitution.)

Two candidates went down to the courthouse to flip the sheriff’s coin. One left a city commission member. The other left with new car tags.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/when-a-state-election-can-be-literally-determined-by-a-coin-toss/265413/