We have had numerous posts here discussing the famous Jefferson-Burr tied electoral vote of 1800 (Jefferson 73, Burr 73, Adams 65, Pinckney, 64, Jay 1.) As we all know, the race went into the House--the *old* House elected at the height of the anti-French scare of 1798, and which therefore had a Federalist majority, although the voting was by state delegation and neither party had a majority of state delegations (8 Republican, 6 Federalist, two equally divided). Eventually enough Federalists gave up on Burr to enable Jefferson to be elected.
But what if the race had not been a two-way tie between the Republicans but a *four*-way tie among all the candidates--Jefferson, Burr, Adams, and Pinckney all getting 69 electoral votes?
I cannot think of a *single* POD to produce this result but there are a few independent but plausible ones that could do it:
(1) The one Rhode Island Federalist elector who voted for Adams and Jay votes for Adams and Pinckney instead.
(2) The General Ticket law fails in the Virginia legislature. It only passed the House of Burgesses narrowly (by four votes) in OTL, despite the heavy Republican majority in that body. So Virginia votes by districts. According to John H. Broussard, *The Southern Federalists 1800-1816* Adams would not have won more than two of the districts. This may well be true if you simply break down the OTL vote by district, but it is likely that some Federalists who would have voted under the district system simply stayed home in OTL because of the hopelessness of Adams getting any electoral votes from Virginia under the General Ticket law. So it does not seem implausible that Adams could have won 3 of Virginia's 21 districts had the voting been by district. (It is true that in 1801 the Federalists only elected one Congressman from Virginia, but that was because of resentment of their having supported Burr. Perhaps a better indicator of Federalist strength in Virginia was in 1803, when the Federalists won three districts outright, a fourth being disputed and not surprisingly decided in favor of the Republican candidate by Congress. Broussard, p. 83.)
Still, even three Adams-Pinckney votes from Virginia would leave us with Jefferson 70, Burr 70, Adams 68, Pinckney (with the additional Rhode Island vote) 68. So...
(3) In North Carolina, where voting was by district, the Federalists won four of the twelve districts in OTL. However, they came within fourteen votes of carrying a fifth one. (Broussard, p. 30) Had they won that one, the vote would be Jefferson 69, Burr, 69, Adams, 69, Pinckney, 69.
An alternative way to get this result relies on New York, and was stated in an old soc.history.what-if post of mine: "What if Governor John Jay followed Hamilton's recommended advice after the Federalists' New York City Assembly debacle? Hamilton's idea was that Jay should reconvene the existing legislature and persuade it to enact a new law for choosing electors by district, which he thought might bring a Federalist majority. Jay, aware that such a maneuver could cause a popular backlash, decided not to do it. If a district plan had resulted in New York casting eight votes for Jefferson and four for Adams, there could be a *three-way* tie for first place in the Electoral College--Jefferson, Burr, and Adams. (Or a four-way tie if the one elector who in OTL voted for Adams and Jay had supported Pinckney as well as Adams...)"
https://groups.google.com/…/soc.hi…/8ZFcjcyBr1g/A0hsvVD_kiQJ
So the race goes into the House, to be decided on a one-delegation-one-vote basis. What now? (Remember, this is under the provision in the original Constitution that the House chooses among the top *five* candidates, not--as would later be the case under the Twelfth Amendment--the top three.)
All the Republicans vote for Jefferson, but what do the Federalists do? My guess is that despite Hamilton's preference for Pinckney, they support Adams--even Hamilton did not dare to *openly* oppose him. (He "merely" called on Federalist electors to vote for Pinckney as well as Adams--which could have made Pinckney president if some South Carolina electors had voted for both Jefferson and Pinckney, which of course did not happen.) But what if Adams decides he will drop out rather than submit the country to a dangerous deadlock? [1] Do we get a Jefferson-Pinckney impasse, and how is it resolved? (Pinckney had promised New England Federalists that he would not accept any votes for himself that were not also cast for Adams, but if Adams dropped out, he might be willing to be a candidate for the presidency in the House.)
[1] "As the day of decision neared, he [Adams] spoke of the indignity of losing to Jefferson, whom he regarded as his inferior; it would be mortifying for him to lose to Pinckney, however, for he thought of him as a nobody. Adams continued to insist that he would resign if he was reelected to the vice-presidency, and once, while in a particularly black mood, he even said he would not serve if the issue had to be settled by the House of Representatives." John E. Ferling, *John Adams: A Life* (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1992), p. 331.
https://books.google.com/books?id=1iU49o9z8osC&pg=PA331