(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Hidden History: America's Strangest Election [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-12
In 1964, the elections for the Illinois State House turned into a sprawling mess with more votes cast, legally, than the entire population of the United States.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
In 1963, the state of Illinois was busy redrawing its state election districts in response to the new population figures from the 1960 census. This redistricting was supposed to be finished in time for the 1964 elections.
But political power in the state was split, with the Republican Party holding a majority in both chambers of the state legislature and the state’s Governor, Otto Kerner, being a Democrat. As partisan legislatures always tend to do, the State House drew its new district maps in such a way as to favor the Republican Party (known as “gerrymandering”). Although this is pretty standard for both parties in every state, this time they went too far, and the Democratic Governor Kerner vetoed the new maps, calling them “unfair”. Bickering ensued. An “independent commission” was nominated to draw up a new set of district maps, but they could not agree amongst themselves and were unable to produce a map that made everyone happy.
As a result, the deadline for establishing the electoral districts came and went, with no agreement, and once the legislative session had expired, the representatives no longer had the legal right to change the districts. So, the Republicans now wanted to just re-use the same district maps from the previous election (which had given them a majority), and filed a lawsuit seeking a court order for this, while the Democrats refused to accept that as a solution.
The matter went to the State Supreme Court, which, in January 1964, rejected the use of the old district maps and ruled instead that there would be no electoral districts in the upcoming election and all of the 177 members of the State House, rather than each representing a specific district, would be “at large” and elected by all voters in the entire state. This was, they ruled, mandated in the State’s somewhat archaic Constitution (adopted in 1870), which specified a deadline for the establishment of state districts, and required an at-large election if this deadline were not met.
Such a process may have been workable in the 1800s when Illinois was a state with a sparse and largely rural population, but in 1964, with an urbanized population of over ten million, it was a nightmare.
The situation had never arisen before, and nobody was quite sure how to handle it. Since there were no districts, there would be no pairs of Democratic and Republican candidates directly facing each other. Instead, every voter in the state would get to cast 177 votes, each—representing one vote for each seat in the House. On the official ballots, then, every candidate’s name (almost 300 of them) would be listed, every voter would get to pick 177 of them, and the top 177 vote-getters would then be elected to office. To save everyone the effort of filling in 177 choices, (and to help keep people within the ten-minute time limit for occupying a voting booth) the official ballot also had an option for each voter to select a straight ticket, and vote either all-Republican or all-Democratic.
That presented a potential problem, though. Since many voters tended to vote a straight ticket, it was entirely possible that all 177 of the top vote-getters would be from the same party, giving them 100% control of the State House. To prevent that, then, and to give guaranteed representation to both parties and their voters, the State election officials set a rule that each party could only field 118 candidates for the 177 seats, thus insuring that even if one party made a theoretical clean sweep, the other party would still have the other 59 seats, about one-third of the legislature, and retain some measure of representation and political influence.
So, when the elections took place in November 1964, each voter got to cast 177 votes in the State House race, giving a total of 525,743,540 votes—over two and a half times the entire population of the United States at the time. It took weeks just to count that many votes, especially when both parties wanted recounts in particular counties.
As it happened, though, the Presidential race that year was a hot one, in which Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was facing Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was a polarizing figure who was widely viewed as a dangerous extremist, and Johnson swept the election, winning by a landslide. He also carried the down-ticket Democrats on his coattails, and in Illinois the Democrats won all 118 seats that they could win, capturing the State House and wresting it away from the Republicans. Kerner also won re-election. The turnout was a whopping 87% of voters.
Both parties, however, now recognized that they could not go through this mess again, so in 1970 a State Constitutional Convention was held to modernize the state’s government. Among other things, the new Illinois State Constitution established a statewide electoral commission which, if the State legislature fails to draw up an electoral map, assumes control of the process and produces a map of its own— thereby removing any necessity for another at-large election.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/12/2209051/-Hidden-History-America-s-Strangest-Election?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
