Talk Elections

Sprung up from the Mitty thread about the football game.

I get first vote! ^_^ Kennedy

I believe Kennedy won the election, but not IL.

Nixon won the popular vote.

Nixon arguably won the popular vote. (What's the popular vote worth though when a large proportion of the population is prevented from voting, at least de facto on account of race?)
The Democrats won the presidential election, even if - as is unlikely but distinctly possible - Texas or Illinois was stolen. The Southern Ind. Democrats were Democrats too.

The question was who was the rightful winner of the election.

Who cares about the popular vote? Kennedy.

So you're saying that whoever won the popular vote is the rightful winner of the election?
Just checking if I got you correctly.

This election is often portrayed as if it came down to a margin of approximately 9,000 in IL (BTW, I've heard there was substantial fraud downstate in favor of Nixon!). This is just not the case, even winning Illinois Nixon needs another large state to come out on top. Texas is often the state mentioned although the margin of 46,000 looks almost too solid to be swung in the other direction in the absence of fraud.  The only outright fraud in the 1960 election was Hawai'i. Nixon's electors had been certified, had voted, and had sent the results to Washington when the Democrats decided that Kennedy had actually won and sent surrogate results to Washington. Under pressure from Hawai'i's 2 Democratic senators, Nixon counted the certificate for Kennedy during the electoral vote count. In Bush v. Gore one of the liberals cited this in their opinion as an example of how the deadline for seating electors doesn't matter.

Kennedy would have won in the House if the votes had been fairly counted.  Kennedy obviously won by fraud, Daley had no problem generating the +4000 votes Kennedy won by.  But Kennedy also won MO by only 4000, and MO has a long and distinguished history (all the way up until at least 2000) of voting the Democratic dead and ghosts of St. Louis.  If only real votes had been counted the result would likely have been Kennedy 263, Nixon 259 and Byrd 15 sending the election into the House where Kennedy would likely have won (Democrats held a 262-175 edge).

There wouldn't even have been any Byrd electors in that case. They were Democrats after all.

Hawai'i wasn't a case of fraud. The certificate was factually incorrect - tallying up all the precinct figures it was based on gives a narrow Dem win.

Kennedy, of course. Who are you to accuse Nixon's opponent of fraud ;)

Nixon...I wouldn't be surprised if New Jersey was stolen either.


But anyways...would make an interesting alternate history thread...(Nixon and the Bay of Pigs, Nixon and the Cuban Missile Crisis...etc)

There is no Cuban missile crisis as Nixon properly supports the bay of Pigs and it overthrows Castro.

The House doesn't vote like that in case of no Electoral College winner. Each state gets one vote in the House.