[EL] why John F. Kennedy received more popular votes in 1960 than Richard Nixon

[Smith, Brad]

Isn’t the reason because none of these examples would have changed the national popular vote winner?

Bradley A. Smith
Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault
  Professor of Law
Capital University Law School
303 East Broad Street
Columbus, OH 43215
(614) 236-6317
bsmith at law.capital.edu<mailto:bsmith at law.capital.edu>
http://www.law.capital.edu/faculty/bios/bsmith.asp

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Winger
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2017 1:54 PM
To: Election Law Listserv
Subject: [EL] why John F. Kennedy received more popular votes in 1960 than Richard Nixon

This morning Rick linked to an article by law professor Edward Zelinsky which suggests that Richard Nixon got more popular votes than John F. Kennedy in 1960.  The Zelinsky article itself links to an article by Ronald Gordon Ziegler.  Although Zelinsky doesn't explicitly claim that Kennedy's popular vote in Alabama should be reduced by 6/11ths, Ziegler does.



The only way for anyone to argue that Nixon got more popular votes than Kennedy is to subtract 6/11ths of Kennedy's Alabama vote.  People who do this say that because the Alabama Democratic presidential elector slate of 1960 was a fusion slate, with 5 Kennedy electors and 6 unpledged electors, therefore Kennedy should lose 6/11ths of his Alabama popular vote.


The trouble with that theory is that no historian ever applies the same method to any other presidential candidate in history who didn't have a full slate of electors pledged to him.  There are many examples:


1. No one ever subtracts 2/11ths of Harry Truman's popular vote in Tennessee in 1948, even though the Democratic slate in Tennessee in 1948 was also a fusion slate, with 9 pledged to Truman and 2 pledged to Strom Thurmond.


2. Norman Thomas and almost all other minor party presidential candidates between 1891 and 1964 almost always just had a single presidential elector candidate in Minnesota, instead of a full slate, but no one ever reduces the Norman Thomas popular vote in Minnesota to one-tweltfh or one-eleventh of the actual popular vote just because there wasn't a full slate (Minnesota had either 12 or 11 electors in those years).  The reason for this behavior in Minnesota was that the state required a separate petition for each elector candidate and so minor parties didn't bother to run more than a single elector because they didn't really expect to win, so what difference did it make.


3. When the Democratic Party in Maine in 1880 engaged in fusion with the Greenback Party, no historian ever shrinks the Maine Democratic vote down to a fraction; similarly no one shrinks the Stephen Douglas vote down in several states in 1860 when he had fusion slates with Bell and/or Breckinridge.

Richard Winger 415-922-9779 PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
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