Gila Bend Council Race Ends on 67-67 Card Draw Under Arizona Law

Q: What are the astonishing odds of a single local politician winning two separate tied elections purely through games of chance?

The odds are about 1 in 104 if you look only at the two random tiebreakers themselves. That estimate comes from multiplying the chance of winning Rubalcava’s two known games of chance in Gila Bend. In 2014, he won a tied council race by coin toss, which is a 1-in-2 chance. In 2026, he won by a high-card draw from a standard 52-card deck after the candidates each tied at 67 votes. For the card draw, each candidate’s card was drawn from the same shuffled deck, and the winner was the candidate with the higher card, with suit ranking used if values matched. In such a two-card draw, each candidate has an equal chance to get the better card, so the chance of winning is also 1 in 2. Multiplying those together gives a 1-in-4 chance of winning both tiebreakers once he reached them. What made the 2026 result more eye-catching is that both candidates drew threes, forcing the suit ranking to decide it: Rubalcava’s Three of Spades beat Athena Guerrero’s Three of Clubs. The probability that two cards drawn without replacement are the same rank is 3 in 51, or about 1 in 17. The specific pairing of Rubalcava getting the Three of Spades and Guerrero the Three of Clubs is far smaller still. If the question includes not just winning the games but also ending up in two separate exact election ties, the true odds would be vastly lower — but that would require vote-distribution data and turnout assumptions that are not available here.

2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Aug 28

Two Gila Bend Town Council candidates finished July’s election tied at 67 votes each, sending the race to a card draw Tuesday to determine the winner.
Arizona’s century-old law requires a game of chance when local races end in a tie; in this case, the candidate drawing the higher card from a shuffled deck claimed the seat.
Town officials in the 1,800-person community staged the tiebreaker as openly as possible, saying transparency mattered in a state roiled by election conspiracy theories.
The unusual finish is not unique: other deadlocked U.S. local races have recently been settled by poker games, straw draws and, in Hawaii this month, names pulled from plastic eggs.