Chips
Those Chips
Junior Chimp
Posts: 5,245
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« on: September 18, 2020, 11:45:43 PM » |
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« edited: September 18, 2020, 11:49:02 PM by Chips »
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Most people know that Kennedy won the 1960 election. Some people also know that Kennedy had a narrow popular vote victory in 1960.....Or maybe not.
Alabama actually had a.....different way of doing things in 1960. Instead of voting for Kennedy directly, Democratic Alabama voters could choose from 11 different electors to vote for either Kennedy or go unpledged thanks to a primary system they had. Nixon won an uncontested 237,981 votes. However, Here's where things get dicey. The media officially declared the popular vote in Alabama by the highest amount an elector for either JFK or unpledged voted. All of the unpledged electors voted for Harry Byrd.
The winner of the most popular votes.....Was an unpledged elector for Harry Byrd with 324,050 votes. The highest elector for Kennedy received only 318,303 votes but voters could also vote for multiple electors. It's estimated that only 550,000 people in Alabama or so actually voted compared to the nearly 900,000 votes that Wikipedia and other sites list. One way to count the vote in Alabama is to divide up the max Democratic elector vote 6/5 as unpledged electors beat Kennedy's 6-5. Harry Byrd drops to 176,755 votes and Kennedy drops to 147,295. Nixon's popular vote total remains unchanged at 237,981. Kennedy drops about 171,008 votes. Kennedy was generally perceived to win the popular vote by only 112,827 votes. If we were to use this method to officially answer who got how many votes in Alabama, 2 things happen.
1, Nixon actually wins Alabama, slightly increasing his electoral total to 230 though Kennedy still wins the election overall.
2. Nixon actually wins the national popular vote by 58,181 votes.
Depending on how you choose to look at it, there are 2 possible 1960 popular vote winners. Kennedy if you follow conventional wisdom and go by what the official records say or Nixon if you choose the method I showed to show Alabama's popular votes which is arguably more fair as the official records show look like 900,000 people voted in Alabama yet there were probably much less who actually voted in reality.
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