[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7626471.stm[/url]

[QUOTE]The odds are that the victor of the American presidential election on 4 November will secure a clean-cut victory in the electoral college - an absolute majority of 270 votes or more.

But that isn't a guaranteed result.

The closer the election gets - and right now the polls have it very tight indeed - the greater the chance that a tie of 269 to 269 will occur.

There are dozens of ways for the College to tie, given the 51 moving parts: the 50 states (each state assigned a number of electoral votes equal to the total of its House and Senate delegation) and the District of Columbia, assigned three electoral votes by constitutional amendment.

[...]

If you mix and match states on the map, in fact, you will quickly see that it relatively easy to produce a tie in the electoral college. So what happens if one occurs? In two words: a mess. [/QUOTE]

Having read that, would it be less confusing to hand the presidency to the first person to say Mornington Crescent?