Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Extremely Close Elections

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Democracies have elections, and when you have elections sometimes you have close elections. Sometimes very close elections. Sometimes very very very close elections. I’m not talking about vote differences of a tenth of a percent, I’m talking about vote differences you can count on one hand…..if you are missing a few fingers. Learn more about the history of extremely close elections on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

democracies have elections. And when you have elections, sometimes you have close elections. Sometimes very close elections. Sometimes very, very, very close elections. I'm not talking about vote differences of a tenth of a percent. I'm talking about vote differences you can count on one hand if you're missing a few fingers. Learn more about the history of extremely close elections on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok.

Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. If you're interested in American history or an electoral history,

CuriosityStream has several programs that will peak your curiosity. They have programs on U.S. presidents like Nixon, Lincoln, Truman, both Roosevelt's, Kennedy, and many others. Prices start as low as $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year, one of the cheapest streaming services available online. If you love to learn, and of course you do because you're listening to this podcast, then start your subscription by visiting everything-everywhere.com slash curiosity stream or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Let me start by saying that when I'm talking about close elections, I'm not talking about recent presidential elections. In the world of close elections, such elections wouldn't even appear on the radar. The 2000 presidential election in Florida, for example, was decided by a whopping 537 votes, which is a colossal amount compared to the numbers we'll be talking about in this episode.

The mathematics behind close elections is pretty simple for our concerns. Let's say you have two people voting, and their votes are distributed randomly. There's a 50-50 chance that the vote. vote will be tied. As you add more votes, the odds of a tie will go down. With four voters, it's 37.5%. And by the time you get to a full-blown actual election, the odds of a tie vote, or a difference of only one vote, become extremely small. However, tiny odds are not zero odds. If you factor in all the elections at every level of government, in every year, in every country, eventually rare events can and will happen. If you want to look at U.S. presidential elections, I'd contend that

the closest one was either the election of 1876, which was decided by a single electoral college vote, or the election of 1824, where there wasn't a winner in the electoral college, and the presidency was decided in the House of Representatives with a single vote. However, as I have done entire episodes on both of those elections, I'll just refer you to listen to those if you haven't already. Let's start with the U.S. House of Representatives, which has elections every two years, and because there are 435 seats, there are many opportunities for close elections. Out of the over 18,000 House elections which have taken place in U.S. history, only one has been decided by a single vote, and that was the 1910 election for New York's 36th congressional district, which represents Buffalo, New York.

In 1910, Democrat Charles Bennett Smith defeated the incumbent Republican de Alva Alexander by a single vote, 20,685 to 20,684. The margin of victory was 0.00242%. The closest election in the U.S. Senate occurred in 1974 in the state of New Hampshire, and it was a doozy. On the day of the election, Republican Louis Wyman defeated Democrat John Durkan by 355 votes out of a total of approximately 220,000 votes cast. It was close enough to have a recount. In the recount, the results flipped, and Durkan won by 10 votes. However, there was another recount, and this time the results flipped again, and Wyman won by two votes. The Constitution says that each House of Congress is the ultimate arbiter of its membership.

The Senate couldn't come to any sort of resolution to the issue, and on August 8, 1975, almost nine months after the election, they declared the seat vacant, and both candidates agreed to a new special election for the seat. In the special election, Durkan won by a commanding 27,000 vote margin. The election took the longest to resolve in U.S. congressional history. The closest gubernatorial election in U.S. history occurred in 1839, in Massachusetts between the Democratic Party candidate Marcus Morton and the incumbent from the Whig Party, Governor Edward Everett. The key to this election wasn't the difference in votes between the two candidates, although it was close, but rather a provision in the Massachusetts state constitution, which required a candidate to receive a majority of the vote. If they didn't get a majority, then the election would be sent to the legislature who could pick a winner. In the election, 102,066 votes were cast. To get a majority, you needed 50% plus one, which in this case would be 51,34 votes.

The incumbent Governor Everett received 50,725 votes, 307 votes were miscellaneous, and Morton received exactly 51, 34 votes, 50% percent. plus one. If he had gotten one less vote, he wouldn't have had a majority, and it would have gone to the Whig-controlled legislature, which certainly would have voted for Everett. After the election, Morton earned the nickname, Landslide Morton. If we go down a step to state legislatures, things get even more interesting. In 1844 in Indiana, there is an incredible story that might actually be apocryphal, but it's such a good story I have to share anyhow. The state Senate race in Switzerland County was between Daniel Kelso and David Henry. Kelso won the election by a single vote.

One of those votes was from a man named Freeman Clark. Clark was old and sick, but Kelso had defended him and gotten Clark acquitted on a murder charge. So Clark insisted on going to vote to vote to show his support for Kelso even though he was near death. Clark's sons carried him to the polling place where he cast his ballot and then died on the way home. That single vote put Kelso into the state Senate. From here, the story gets even better. At the time, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures. The Indiana legislature elected Edward Hanigan by one vote, with Kelso being one of the state senators voting for Hanigan. When Hanigan was in the U.S. Senate, the vote to admit Texas as a state into the union was determined by, you guessed it, one vote. And sure enough,

one of the senators who voted to admit Texas was Hanigan. So, according to this story, which might just be a legend, an elderly man's vote in Indiana who died soon after casting it was responsible for Texas becoming a state. And I don't care if the story is true or not, it's a great story. But what happens if the election is closer than one vote? What happens if there's a tie? In 1994, in a Wyoming State House of Representatives race,

Republican Randall Luthy, an independent candidate Larry Call, each received 1,941 votes. By law, the election was determined randomly. So, live on the Today Show, the Wyoming Secretary of State selected a ping-pong ball from a hat, and the winner was Randall Luthie. Luthey, Luthey, went on to become the Speaker of the House in the state of Wyoming. While exact ties are extremely rare, they do happen, and how ties are resolved are unique to each state. In the state of Nevada, the law dictates that in the event of a tie, the winner is determined by lot. However, this is Nevada, and so they have to do things their own way.

In 2002, in Esmeralda County, Nevada, there was a tie for a county commissioner seat between Democrat J.J. Gillum and Republican Dolores D. Honeycutt. They each received exactly 107 votes. The election was determined by drawing a card from a deck. Both candidates drew a jack. However, the rules stipulated beforehand that the suits had a ranking, spades, hearts, diamonds, and then clubs. Gilliam drew a spade and Honeycutt drew a diamond. Gilliam won. Despite the examples I've just given, close or tied elections are not unique to the United States.

In 1994, in an election to the Quebec Assembly, incumbent from the Liberal Party, Michelle Charbonneau tied with party Quebecwa candidate Roger Pacquin, they each received exactly 16,536 votes. The election was resolved in a runoff election where Pacquin won by 532 votes. The more votes which are cast, the lower the odds of a tie occurring. By that measure, the greatest tie vote in history occurred in 2011 in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland. In an election for the Swiss Federal Assembly, Marco Romano and Monica Duka Widmer tied with exactly 23,979 votes each. They were both from the same political party. This is the largest number of votes cast in an election that tied,

that I could find. The odds of such results are exceedingly small. The election was initially resolved by a computer program that randomly chose Widmer as the winner. However, the use of a computer program to select a winner was challenged and the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled against the Canton and ordered a manual lottery. In the manual draw, this time Romano was the winner. The odds of view casting the deciding ballot in any election is exceedingly small, but it isn't And if you have any doubt, just remember the case of Freeman Clark, who cast the deciding vote for the guy who cast the deciding vote for the guy who cast the deciding vote to make Texas into a state. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com where you can get exclusive merchandise and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Leave a five-star review to have your review read online.