An unusual scene occurred on the House floor this week as the chamber’s vote tally came to a tie at 215 to 215 when three House Republicans joined Democrats to oppose an effort to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Although the impasse was quickly resolved, as a fourth House Republicans changed his vote to oppose the bill in a procedural move that allows leadership to bring the legislation up again at a later date, it brought forward an issue that could come up again with a razor-thin Republican majority in the lower chamber — what happens if there’s a tie vote in the House?

What a tie vote means in the House 

According to House rules, in the case of a tie vote, a question before the chamber “shall be lost.” In the lower chamber, where Republicans hold just a slim majority and often see a handful of defections among their conference, there’s no tie-breaker in the House of Representatives. Unlike in the Senate, where a tie-breaking vote may be cast, no one is brought in to resolve the issue.

Breaking a tie vote in the Senate

In the upper chamber, which sees tie votes with more regularity, the Vice President is called upon to cast tie-breaking votes. In recent years, with a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris has on more than 30 occasions cast a tie-breaking vote, breaking the record set almost 200 years ago.