The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Dog Mayors, Zombie Presidents, Death By Voter Fraud

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

In this special episode, the weirdest things we learned this week range from Edgar Allen Poe's peculiar death to how salamanders influenced the term Gerrymander. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis, dummies, and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Tradesh. I'm Sarah Trodosh. I'm I'm Prabita Saha. And I'm Claire Maldarelli. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we usually do things a certain way. And this week, we're not going to do them that way at all. So I'm not going to go through my normal spiel. But today, we are here to talk about one very important subject. The election. Oh, no. Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. In typical weirdest thing, fashion, we have no intention of discussing the news of the day or talking about things you're already stressed out about so you can stress out about them more. Weirdest thing is a place to decompress, de-stress, and learn some bizarre stories that can help you take your mind off the world

around you. And our election-themed episode is no different. We can't promise you won't learn anything relevant to our modern democracy or a certain upcoming election that you should absolutely vote in if you have the ability to do so. But any of that will happen by accident and you won't even notice because you'll be having such a fun time. So instead of our usual format of three longish facts, we are just going to bombard you with an infotainment hurricane. of just absolutely off the wall, or at least pretty intriguing. Facts related to elections, government, elected officials, founding fathers who like to hang out in the nude, etc. So let's get into it. I figured we should start with just kind of a whirlwind tour of some of the

world's most surprising past and present voting laws and requirements. Perbita, I think you have some info for us on why we hold elections on the day that we do. Yeah. So election day has been the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November for almost the past 200 years. It was decided by the federal government as a holiday, which we don't actually get off on for work. In 1845, and prior to this, every state had its own election day schedule. So this was just a way to standardize it across the country. That said, the timing was picked because back then, much of the country was working in agriculture and on their own little personal farms. This was pre-industrial revolution. And so a lot of the weird timing is because of people's farming schedules. We chose November

because it fits squarely between harvest in the fall and, you know, getting the fields ready again in the winter. And Tuesday is a bit more of a tricky selection process. It was kind of done by process of elimination. We couldn't do Sunday because that's when most people were going to church. Couldn't do Wednesday because that's when most families had to travel long distances to go sell their wares on the market. And between those days, again, the families needed a travel day because they were living in super rural areas far away from polling locations. So with all that said, it came down to having election day on Tuesday. And we've been sticking to that ever since. Wow. The number of things that are happening in the U.S. that are because of farmers is astounding to me.

Farmers influence so much of the U.S. Well, now for something completely different, I just learned that in Tennessee, you technically are not allowed to run for or hold any elected office. If you have ever been in a duel, challenged someone to a duel, aided or abetted people participating in a duel. So, you know, that hint set, what a problem that used to be. Politicians were just running around occasionally shooting each other. I will talk more about a particularly dual happy president from our nation's history in a little bit. But yet, it's also true in Tennessee that technically no person who denies the being of God or a future state of rewards and punishments can hold any office

in the Civil Department of Tennessee. That is true. There are eight states in our great nation where it is technically illegal to hold office if you like are an atheist. They all use slightly different phrasing, but the effect is if you do not subscribe to a belief in a higher being, you are not technically supposed to be allowed to hold any governmental office. That is, Pennsylvania, where I live now, and I did not know that this was a rule. Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, not Missouri. Mississippi. I take it back. It's Mississippi. I'm sorry, Missouri. So, like, all of these books are still in the laws.

But they are not upheld anymore because in 1961 there was a Supreme Court decision that said it was a violation of a person's rights under the first and 14th amendments to prevent someone from holding office based on their religious beliefs. So basically, like, all these laws are still there because no one's ever bothered to actually go back and say like, okay, well, you cannot actually have this law. But they are all still technically on the books. Also, there's like a very large percentage of the U.S. who said like they would not vote for someone who is an atheist. So though it is not illegal, in effect, you have a very hard time getting elected if you are an atheist still. That reminds me of another fact I found about who is allowed to vote for office. So this is one that gets shared a lot as being hilarious. And if you're a regular listener of weirdest thing, you might understand why it's actually really not.

So in Ohio, the Constitution says you can't vote if you're an idiot. And as I talked about on an episode of Weirdest Thing about my hometown, Vineland, New Jersey, which is where the word moron was invented, terms like idiot and moron were actually medical terms. So when you see a law that refers to an idiot, it is actually a really horrible, ableist, very outdated law that should not exist. So Ohio's constitution actually states, no idiot or insane persons shall be entitled to the privileges of an elector. And there are similar laws in New Mexico and Mississippi. be. But luckily, a federal law says that a person can't be barred from voting due to supposed incompetence except in very, very limited circumstances. People who have cognitive disabilities are entitled to vote, even if they are under guardianship, even if they're

receiving care, if they, you know, live in a group home or another care facility, they are still entitled to vote. And in fact, people with certain disabilities can also receive help with voting from friends, family members, or caregivers. So suck it, Ohio's Constitution. That is what I have to say. I'm going to inject a little fun fact into here because I feel like this past few had been a little depressing. Did you not find that fun, Claire? I personally did not. But this one, hopefully, everyone will. So I have never thought about the country of Lick. Oh my gosh. I even wrote down how to pronounce it. Lick 10 Stein. It's a tiny country that literally I wrote down Lick space 10, space Stein. All right. Anyway, moving on. It's a tiny country. It's mostly known for being the richest nation per capita in the world.

and its methods for providing citizenship are also unique. This municipality prepares a bio about each family who hopes to secure citizenship, and they have to put in all of this information about themselves, like where they work, what hobbies they do, maybe even their astrological sign. I don't know, probably not, but, you know, it could be a hobby of theirs. And then essentially the entire registered voters of Lichtenstein are allowed to vote on whether this person or this family can gain citizenship. And everyone who lives in Lichtenstein is allowed to vote. So essentially the whole country votes on whether you and your family and your hobbies are allowed to be citizens of Lichinstein, which I love.

And it is also very, very hard to become a citizen there. So don't feel like you can just up and move to Lichtenstein whenever you want. Between the periods of 2011 and 2014, only 18 people gain citizenship in this manner. I do know that Lichtenstein is smaller. I just looked up the population because I was curious. It's just under 39,000. So pretty small for a country, but very rich. Their GDP per capita is like twice ours.

Sorry, I got distracted by the population. of Lincolnstein. I found out that, speaking of general suffrage, that women used to have the right to vote in Utah. They still do, just to be clear, but they used to have it back of the day and then lost it for a brief period, which is a little bit strange. So apparently technically, Wyoming was the first U.S. state slash territory to give women the right to vote. But Utah technically had the first election. So they did have the first women who actually voted. But 17 years later, it was effectively revoked with the Edmunds Tucker Act, which was basically like an act of legislation that tried to get rid of polygamy. So they required that an oath be taken that you were not a

polygamist. And since a huge fraction of the population of Utah at that time, like Utah wasn't even a state, it was the Utah territory, since a huge fraction of the women there were in polygamous relationships. That basically meant that the women didn't no longer had the right to vote anymore. But as far as I can tell, I think it also meant that polygamous men didn't have the right to vote. I think if you were in fact, like, in a polygamous relationship at the time, so you like, you couldn't vote, you couldn't serve on a jury and you couldn't hold public office. But it ended up getting resolved because the Mormon Church ended its endorsement of polygamy officially in 1890. and then five years after that, Utah adopted a constitution that restored women's suffrage.

And then a year after that, Congress was like, yep, Utah can be a state now. And it was all okay. Utah is a really pretty state. It is. A beautiful, strange place, I would say. It's also one of the states that for a long time prohibited the sale of alcohol around election day. And this is more because not of the actions of voters, but because of the shade of

actions of politicians. A lot of politicians, including our founding father, George Washington himself, they would whine and dine voters just to buy their allegiance. This practice goes all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, but it has quite a bit of history here in the U.S. as well. Like I said, George Washington, early in his governing career, he's been known to buy rum, punch, hard cider, and beer for voters to get them to cast their ballots in support of him. Honestly, better bar options than some of the weddings I've been to. I hope your friends listen to this podcast, Perita. Yeah, I haven't been to that many weddings, so it'll be easy for them to know if I'm talking about them.

You know who you are. And this practice was called Swilling the Bumns. which I don't quite know what that means, but I love it, and I will use that phrase often. And it led some states, including Utah, South Carolina, Alaska, and even Massachusetts to pass prohibition specifically around Election Day. Most states have since revoked that temporary ban on alcohol. And yeah, it's unclear if that hurt or helped the politicians. cause in the end. Bumbo, by the way, is a drink made from rum, water, sugar, and nutmeg, which sounds pretty lovely. I just googled it. I do feel like sometimes before I go into

the voting booths that I could use, like a glass of wine or something, just to calm my nerves. Not that I haven't prepared. Shots. Just take a shot. Exactly. Exactly. Not that I haven't prepared and know who I'm going to vote for. I just feel like sometimes like in the moment, like, you know, like white coat syndrome and you go to the doctor, you're like, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh, my God, oh my God. Which brings me to my next fact of most people know who they're going to vote for when they get in, but obviously you're getting there and you're like, shoot, everything's new. Maybe I haven't been to this specific polling booth before, so you want to orient yourself. But you don't have forever. In many states, there are actually time limits on the amount of time

that you can spend in the voting booth itself. So the state of Indiana limits voters to just three minutes inside the voting booth, which seems like a long time, but for me, I think it would be short. And then Alabama caps it at four. That sounds so short to me. Yes, it's very stressful. Kansas gives you five minutes. So both you and me would probably want to move to California then because that gives you an eternity of 10 minutes. But when I researched this further, it doesn't really look like anyone ever in history that I could find, at least, has actually enforced any of these limits.

So a 1988 article in the LA Times reported that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a law that limits that 10 minute in a voting booth, but local officials said they never implanned to enforce the law. Quote, I cannot see how we can chase somebody out of a booth after 10 minutes, said Charles Wisebird, Los Angeles County's register a recorder. Everybody's going to have time to vote. I love Charles. So, yeah, and I couldn't find any evidence of any of any of. other state enforcing these laws. So even if they exist and it looks like they do and they were dated back to the early 1900s, though it's not clear why they exist and it doesn't look like anyone enforces it. So when you get in there, just take a breath and know that you have forever if you

choose, but you will anger everybody behind you. And of course, now it's totally different with the way the world is. But I get very anxious in the voting booth. And this year for the first time ever I got a mail-in ballot that I'm going to physically drop off in the ballot box. and it's so wonderful to just sit with my ballot and be able to research people instead of walking in and thinking, who are most of these people? I don't know. It is like the opposite of stressful. I agree. I felt the same way. I really feel like going to the voting booths is like going to the doctor. But telemedicine is not like that. I feel like I still get nervous into telemedicine medicine. That's true. In some countries, it is actually illegal to try to influence people at all on election day, sort of also related back to the alcohol thing.

here in the U.S. Election Day is like a big game or a big party for all of the news networks who get tons of people to tune in so that they can show you every single percentage that is now reporting in every single county. But in a bunch of countries, you are just not allowed to talk about the election. Like there's many countries like New Zealand where on election day you are not allowed to talk about the election like until a certain time or just like for the 24 hours of. election day so like you can have election coverage up until the day before but on the day all the newscasters just have to pretend like nothing's going on just i love things are normal so there's like russia portugal bulgaria armenia they all do it for 24 hours but there's also places that do it for more than that so argentina mosaic mosaic maryngu i'mosambique nepal paraguay sri Lanka that's all 48 hours and then australian indonesia it's like three days like there are elections on a saturday and i think

you're not allowed to talk about the election starting on like the Wednesday, which honestly, we should adopt. It drives me insane. It makes me so stressed. I feel like we should just, just don't talk about it. Just everybody gets to vote because like that's the idea is just you should have some space mentally to think about who do I want to vote for, not who is a TV network telling me to vote for, but what do I think as an individual? I love it. I'm, I've supported. Yeah, I could see that being, swinging the opposite way and maybe, you know, restricting everyone from talking about the elections. So does it also, like if I, as a journalist, tweeted about election results, would I be censored around that? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think it has to do with media. Like, I don't think anyone is preventing individuals from, like, mentioning the election. But I think the idea is that you're not supposed to be. to be publishing anything that would like try to convince you any particular way like you can't tell people about like what the latest polling data is or anything like that i don't know how far it extends

though like i don't know if journalists in those countries are not allowed to discuss it at all that's a really good question i don't know so there's this method of voting in gambia that might that you would think would make it be able to eliminate all of those issues but surprisingly they still come up. So in Gambia, which is a small West African country, up until at least 2018, voting was done using glass marbles, which is a system that was introduced in the 1960s in Gambia to allow all citizens to vote easily, regardless of their reading aptitude. And it works like this. So inside the voting booth, there's drums that are placed on a bench, and each drum is adorned with an image of the political candidate and the symbol for their party. And there's a small hole

that's then placed in the drum just large enough for a marble. And when a voter enters the voting booth and casts their vote using a single marble, a small noise of the marble hitting the drum sounds is followed by a bell that signals a vote has been cast. And when voting is over, officials count up the number of marbles in each drum. So you would think, okay, easy enough, why don't we just all adopt this marble system, which I actually think is very cool. I want to vote by marble.

The method isn't foolproof, though. slight shifts and sounds from one drum to the next can throw secrecy out the window. And if a voter chooses not to cast a vote, a lack of that bell ringing will give their nominee away. So you can go into the voting booth. And if no one hears a bell, everyone around you knows that you actually decided not to cast a vote for any of the candidates. And then if you're a really good listener or if you're specifically listening to figure out which drum is for which candidate, you can do that too, even though that sounds very, very challenging. don't think it's worth the effort. I haven't figured out if they've continued that after 2018,

but I know it was done up until then. Well, I think that is a great segue into talking about some of the ways that elections can go wrong. So actually the story I was most excited to tell, that is like the reason why I was like, we should do an election-themed episode. Trust me, folks, I don't want to think about the election either, but I really wanted to talk about Edgar Allan Poe and how he may have been killed in a voter fraud scheme. So no one knows exactly for sure how Edgar Allan Poe died. He was traveling and he was then found in Baltimore seemingly really inebriated. And, you know, Edgar Allan Poe, if you've read his stuff, like, you know he drank. And he was a sad drunk. And so it is totally possible that he just got himself into some trouble or maybe had an underlying illness that led to him, you know, basically being found like in a bad way outside a random bar in Baltimore. And he died not long after he was brought to the hospital. But there is this one theory that even though we'll probably never be able to prove it, I just find so fascinating.

We do know that Po happened to be found on Election Day in Baltimore and that where he was found was both a bar and a polling place because I guess that's a thing that people used to do. So Baltimore elections in particular were really notorious for being very corrupt at this time. This was 1849. and there were political gangs that would do just about anything to get their candidate elected. Any kinds of bribing or ballot stuffing or stealing you can think of. But they also did this thing called Cooping, where they would just kidnap random people and hold them in a room called the Coop, hence the name. And we know that when Cooping took place,

Basically what would happen is that this person would be dragged around and forced to vote at multiple polls. So they were basically being used to commit voter fraud because the gangs just needed as many bodies as possible circulating through the polls and placing votes for their candidate of choice. And so victims of couping were often plied with alcohol, perhaps even drugged in some. circumstances with opium or another, you know, substance. And they very often were put into different outfits so that they could actually be forced to go through the same polls multiple times and vote again. And so Edgar Allan Poe was indeed found in like a weird ramshackle outfit that was not his usual black woolen suit. And he had definitely been drinking a lot. It seemed like maybe he had been beaten up a bit. And so this theory is that he was cooped and they just

dumped him. And, you know, he had like a pretty weak constitution. And the theory is that, you know, the combination of alcohol and roughing up just proved too much for him. So again, there's no way to prove this. And there have been some biographers of Edgar Allan Poe who have just absolutely hated this theory. But it persists because it's a great story. And also, you know, a bad way to go out, I have to say. Yeah. Wow. That was wild and not at all what I expected when you said you were doing this fact. good Lord I have a fact but I do not have a transition into the fact so I'm just going to jump in because there's no way to connect this to Edgar Al and Poe I don't think however I am here to talk to you about the most fraudulent election in history actually we could we could get a death in here I'll squeeze a death in here and that'll be our transition perfect great so the most fraudulent election

in history according to Guinness World Records was in Liberian president, Charles D.B. King, who somehow got 234,000 votes despite their only being 15,000 eligible voters. Because at the time... Just a little too overzealous. Yeah, you know. I think it's funny that it was so fraudulent that it was like a mistake. Like, I just don't even understand how we got to this point. But yeah, it was at the time only America Liberians could vote. So if you were an indigenous person living in Liberia, you could not vote. So 15,000 people could vote. His opponent got 9,000 votes, which seems to suggest he would have won. So I guess there was reason for it to be fraudulent because he was going to lose. But he cheated and he won,

I believe. So that's just a fun little fact about Liberia. Other interesting facts about the Liberian government, though, in general, there is definitely a lot of corruption. But I think it is worth noting that Liberia managed to gain their independence in 1847, which is like a century before any other country in Africa or most of the other ones. So South Africa was in 1910, but most of the rest of the continent, not until the 1950s. And they have been electing their presidents ever since for the most part. There was one or two violent coups in there. And so there were some deaths, and that will be our transition. But it is the, it is the first and oldest modern republic. in Africa. So Liberia, if you do not know, because I did not until I met a guy from Liberia,

is a country that was founded by freed, enslaved people coming from the U.S. and the Caribbean. So their government is based on ours. Like they have exactly the same three branches, and they have their own Supreme Court, and it's like a little bit different because Liberia is a different country demographically to the U.S. But it is very similarly structured. like the U.S. They denied suffrage to their indigenous people until a military coup in 1980. But also they elected a female president in 2005.

She was the first elected head of state in Africa. So Liberia is a mixed bag, presidentially speaking, but very interesting. I'd also like to give a shout out to Emmanuel because I don't think he listens to this podcast, but I'm going to tell him to listen to it and he's going to be excited. So, hi, Emmanuel.

How's it going? Quick question, Sarah. when exactly did this fraudulent election in Liberia happened? Right. Sorry. It was in 1927. So quite a long time ago. I don't know what the voting system was at the time that they managed to get 234,000 fake votes. But yeah, almost a century ago now. Okay, good. I'd be worried if it was much more recent. Yeah. Yes. Speaking of voter fraud, this is a little PSA for anybody concerned about how many people who are voting by mail this year because of COVID-19. Actually, all research and data on the subject suggests that voting by mail is not rife with corruption or attempts at fraud.

So the Electronic Registration Information Center, which is a nonprofit, recently found that in three states, I believe, that use vote by mail, there were just 370,000. possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of a deceased person. And that was out of 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general election. So that's 0.0025%. So worry about other things. Voting by mail, it's great. It improves access to voting. And we want everyone to vote. I love that PSI, Rachel. And on the list of things that people currently should be worried about in terms of voting, gerrymandering is at the very top as well. So just a little history on gerrymandering, which involves the redrawing of voting districts by politicians so that, you know, it might be rigged toward one party versus the other, rather than being actually based on population data. So this practice goes back to 1812 when the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge, Jerry,

he decided that he didn't like how the voting map of Massachusetts fell. So he got a little help from his fellow Republican politicians in the state government. to just recreate that map in a way that distributed the party votes more widely across the state. And the result of those districts, which was published in the Boston Gazette, and you can even go look up a scan of the map in the Library of Congress, kind of looked like a curled up dragon. And the reporters in the Boston Gazette, they made a joke that it actually looked like a salamander. So they came up with the term gerrymander, a portmanteau of Elbridge Jerry's name and Salamander.

And yeah, I mean, it worked for Elbridge. He ended up winning the next election quite soundly. And sadly, the gerrymandering still exists widely in the U.S. today. It's been debated in the Supreme Court, but really it comes down to state laws. and this current census that we just participated in, the 2020 National Census, the results of that might have a big influence on how voting maps look in the future. You shouldn't worry about voter fraud, but you should worry about gerrymandering. Yes. That's all I have to say.

And we should worry about gerrymandering so much that I have another PSA about voter suppression. Sorry, I'm going to make you think about something important. just for a little bit. So voter suppression is a really serious problem. And one particular example of it is voting ID laws. So if you've never really stopped to think about voter ID laws, they might make sense to you. You know, we want people to be who they say they are when they vote and to only vote once. But voter ID laws are often referred to as a solution in search of a problem. In-person fraud is really rare. The ACLU, that's the American Civil Liberties Union, cites a study that since the year 2000, there were only 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation. And, you know, that's the only type of voter fraud that photo IDs could actually prevent. And a lot of the instances of supposed to be able to. and fraud are actually honest mistakes. It's an election worker messing up or a voter showing up in the wrong place, that kind of thing. And voter ID laws limit the number of people who are

able to vote. And this disproportionately affects black Americans and other marginalized groups. So there are millions of Americans who don't have a photo ID, actually 11% of U.S. citizens. that's more than 21 million Americans. And this is often because like IDs cost money. Even if you have a free option for getting an ID, you often need other paperwork to get it, like birth certificates. And so those documents and the requirements for them means that lower income Americans are less likely to have a government-issued photo ID

than wealthier Americans. And if you have a physical disability or you're elderly or you're in a rural area and you don't have reliable access to transportation, that also makes it harder for you to go to get an ID. According to the ACLU, there are some parts of rural Texas where you need to travel almost 200 miles to get to the nearest ID office. So we know that voter ID laws lower turnout by several percentage points, you know, to the tune of tens of thousands of votes. We know that they disproportionately affect minority voters. Only around 8% of white people in America lack photo IDs, but up to a quarter of black citizens of voting age do not have them. And yeah, it's also a law that can be implemented in a really discriminatory manner. For example,

in Texas, you can use a concealed weapons permit to vote. But you can't use a student ID card. So, yikes. Voter ID laws. They're bad. We shouldn't have them. The data doesn't support them. And that is just one example of the way that state laws can make it harder for people to cast their ballots.

And yeah, you should worry about that way more than you should worry about voter fraud. That's what the data says. Yeah, way more people. didn't vote in the last election, like as in 2016, then voted for either candidate. And definitely a lot of those are from voter suppression, just like people who have found it too difficult to actually be able to vote, which is really awful. Also, a lot of people who feel like my vote doesn't really count, it doesn't really matter, I'm just one person. But the number of elections that have been decided by literally one vote is like, it's bigger than zero. There's more than a dozen. No, no.

there was a there was a Republican House race in 2018 that was lost by one vote and it turned out that the guy's friend had forgotten to mail in his ballot he left on his kitchen counter which is so sad the same thing happened in Washington for a state house primary one of the guys like work colleagues forgot to mail in his ballot and he lost by one why one vote in 2017 there was a race for the Virginia House of Delegates that ended in a a tie and literally was broken by pulling a name out of a bowl. And significantly, that also gave the GOP control of the state house by one seat, which is wild. And in 2016, there was a Vermont statehouse seat that was decided by a single vote. And the race was a rematch from 2010 when the race was also decided by one vote, but in the other direction. So they, in those intervening years, I guess they persuaded one person to switch sides, which I think is wild. Also, Don't vote for your friends and coworkers if you don't agree with their actual platforms. This isn't, we're not voting for prom king here.

Vote for who you want to vote for. If you believe in them, you should, but don't, your vote is secret. So if you think your friend would be bad at governing, don't vote for them. Goat for someone else. No one will know. You can lie. And speaking of that tiebreaker that you mentioned, Sarah, of them needing to break it by drawing a name out of a bowl, there's more tiebreakers out there, and they're worse. In 2014, according to the Orlando Sentinel, the Mount Dora City Council race was decided when the city clerk drew a candidate's name out of a felt top hat.

So this was a tiebreaker as well, and they were like, let's just kick it back, old school style. in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore beat George W. Bush in New Mexico by just 366 votes. But if it had been a tie, state law says that the winner would have been decided by a game of chance, such as they say, a single hand of poker. That's not a game of chance. That's not chance. Wow. Imagine if it came down to their poker skills. I would be in very bad shape.

And other elections have also been called by coin flips and ping pong ball drawing akin to like a lottery drawing. So whoever gets the highest number wins the election. I know there's like not a great way to break ties, but shouldn't there be? Because that seems silly. This just feels like like a family game night where they're like, okay, this is what happens when it's a tie. but for real in elections. Yeah, and if you need another form of tie-breaking,

there's always that octopus that... Oh, my goodness, yes. People say guesses the correct Super Bowl winner every single year. So, yeah, let's just use the octopus to predict our elections. A winner decided by octopus. Let's talk about some really bizarre candidates and winners. Perbita, I think you have a particularly freaky one to start us off with. Yeah, we've seen this happen across multiple states and towns, but you'll regularly hear

local stories about candidates getting elected after they've died. So one particular example, in November of 2018 in Nevada, Dennis Hoff, who was a pretty controversial figure. He owned some big brothels in the state and also had been accused of sexual assault. He won the State Assembly primary and was on the ticket to, you know, head to the capital and stayed on the ticket even though he died in his sleep in October. So what happens when you know, a candidate dies while they're still in the running, the decision lands with the state government. So if the state decides that, you know, they want to leave a dead candidate on the ballot and then depending on the results, end up replacing them with a candidate of their choosing,

they can do that. And it's a pretty strategic decision. So that's what ended up happening in Nevada. It's happened in California. It's happened in Alaska. So, yeah, just stay up on the news on whether your candidates are still breathing or not come November. Of course, on the flip side, we get a lot of politicians talking about voter fraud in that ballots are getting mailed out to people who've died and who can't actually, you know, cast a authentic vote. There's been a lot of research and data on this, and a lot of the experts who analyze this data say that it actually doesn't happen that often. Voter registration lists are constantly updated on the county level, so when people pass away, they're usually removed from these lists. And even if they're not, even if they do get sent a ballot, it's usually very rare that

someone else will try and forge their signature and send a vote in. So, you know, if you hear people talking about this, there's a little juice for you to extend that conversation. Pervita, I see your dead candidate and I raise you mayor footpowder. Oh, wow. Well done on that transition. Now, I don't think anyone at Popsai, including me, believes that the election process is a laughing matter. But for one coastal town in Ecuador, residents just seemed like they needed a grin. Maybe it was a down year. It was like a COVID-type year. So according to local reports, a foot powder named Pulvapis was elected mayor of this 4,000 resident coastal town in Ecuador. During the peak of campaigning for municipal elections in the town, the foot powder company

ran ads as a joke with the slogan, quote, vote for any candidate, but if you want well-being and hygiene, vote for Polvopis. And as additional jokes and laughs, they sent out these marketing, and for marketing tactics, I would assume, the company sent out these pamphlets that resembled the official voting papers, which were the same size in color, and they said, quote, for mayor, honorable Polvopis. And on election day, to everyone, surprise, the foot powder ended up coming away with a sweeping win. So everyone sent in for the foot powder to win. Now, obviously, they read- Wait. Sorry, did they mail in the fake ballots? Correct. Or did they write in the foot powder? So it's obviously a very, very popular story, and I had to go

off of reports from Ecuador as well as other people who had covered it. But it seems like, They did a combination of writing in for the foot powder and sending in these fake pamphlets. Wow. Correct. Wow. What a terrible joke in the end. I honestly, I think it's very, very funny. Did the foot powder serve?

The foot powder did not serve. It served its purpose on their feet. And I'm sure that many, many people went out and bought this foot powder after. It's making me almost want to buy this foot powder. And I've never used foot powder in my life. but I'm like, if it could get elected mayor, it's got to do something good for your feet. So, yeah, I'm assuming they just eliminated the votes. So they had to pick a new mayor, I guess.

They did have to pick a new mayor. I do not know how they picked the new mayor, but the original votes, the foot powder won. So, Claire, do you know if the foot powder was for athletes vote or dry skin? Was it a single issue foot powder? or did it, you know, address a lot of different conditions? Wow, that's a great, interesting question that I didn't expect. I think it was like an all-purpose foot powder for like the every man. Anti-itching smell.

Yeah. Yeah. Just like anything that your foot needs, this powder had. Well, with a platform like that, of course it won. Yeah, I'd vote for it too. It's hard to top foot powder, but I have some unusual candidates who actually served, in air quotes. So first I'm going to talk about Lucy Lou, not the actress, Lucy L-O-U. We can talk about the other Lucy Lou another time.

But Lucy Lou was the first female mayor of Rabbit Hash Kentucky and ran on the campaign slogan, the bitch you can count on. She was also a border collie. Aw, cute. Heck yeah. I love that. I would love a shirt with that slogan. The bitch you can count on.

For sure. So this is actually a not uncommon thing in towns that aren't incorporated. So they don't actually have any need for their own government. You know, they are governed by. the county that they are in. They do not have autonomous operations to take care of. So, yeah, you'll see these like random small or really rural, unincorporated towns that do figurehead elections, these ceremonial elections that generally are to raise money for a local charity or just for the town budget. And they are often animals. Lucy Lou actually,

She was the first mayor of Rabbit Hash not to die while in office, but she did leave to make a bid for president. Her campaign manager and owner, Bobby Kayser, told HuffPost in 2016, all the other presidential candidates are dogs. Why shouldn't a real one run? She did not successfully run for president, though. Animals cannot run for actual elected office in the U.S. But yeah, there's like a whole list on Wikipedia of animals that have run or been elected to office. There have been goats. There have been goats that drank beer.

There was a cat named Stubbs who was a mayor in Alaska for like 15 years, I think. There apparently Stubbs would drink. They would put catnip in water and he would drink it out of water. and he would drink it out of wine glasses. There have been lots of dogs. And in addition to animals, these kinds of figurehead just for fun elections, often elect small children,

which is how I found the five-year-old two-time mayor of Dorset, Minnesota, Bobby Tufts. So Dorset is a small, unincorporated town. It's supposedly the restaurant capital of the world. I don't know exactly what that means, but that's how they build themselves. And elections there, you vote by paying a dollar to put someone's name into a bowl. And then the winner is chosen at random. So you can greatly increase your chances of winning by having friends or family that will pay a dollar to vote for you.

So yeah, Bobby was mayor for two terms. most of his job was to like show up at town events and give out candy and pose for photos. And apparently his mom was like, I'm really ready to not have this responsibility to drag my five-year-old places for ceremonial events anymore. But he was replaced by Eric Mueller. This was in 2014. He was a 16-year-old who didn't even live in the town. His family just vacations there, which is rude. but he had just set a local record for eating fried ice cream.

He ate five of them in a row. And so that gave him enough notoriety, I guess, that he had some votes in the game and was able to win. But Bobby, you know, graciously seated the race to his older opponent. But there are really cute and kind of scary videos of the. power-tripping five-year-old mayor. I really recommend looking them up. Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Yeah. Did you guys know that the first female mayor was put on the ballot by a bunch of men as a joke? But she was like a legit, like she had mayorial powers. Like it was not just like a small town like, ah, ha, ha, the mayor doesn't do anything. This was in, in Kansas in 1887. So prohibition was a. major issue of the time. The women's Christian Temperance Union was campaigning for like various

prohibitionist men for office because that was generally who held office back then. But a bunch of anti-prohibitionist men thought that they could kind of squash the issue by basically like they copied the same slate of people as the prohibitionist faction. But then instead of the mayor, whoever they nominated, they put Susanna Madora Salter. who was a 27-year-old wife and mother at the time, and they just figured, only true extremists would vote for a woman. That was so silly.

So the prohibitionist plan would fail. Like, everyone was just going to vote, uh, like, who would possibly vote for a woman. And when her name, like, went up on election day,

all the like local townsfolk kind of like went over to her and was like, did you know that you're on the ballot? And would you like to maybe not, on the ballot and she said no and she ended up with 60% of the vote and her husband apparently was very supportive he made made some jokes about how funny it was that he was the husband of the mayor that was so ridiculous at the time but she served as mayor legitimately which i think is great how is this not a movie already yeah it sounds like the ideal yeah i agree i think the fact that the protagonist would be a prohibitionist probably makes it a less fun movie

True. That's fair. The ladies' temperance union has not been treated very kindly or glamorously by history. So speaking of history, what a great transition. Very natural. Yeah, I wanted to just hearken back real quick to some of our previous weirdest thing stories about presidents, founding fathers, just a few. So that listeners, maybe you'll go back and check those episodes out if they haven't yet. So in one of our episodes that I believe features a title zombie president in it, we talked about how after George Washington died, there was a physician who really earnestly wanted to try to bring him back to life by pumping him full of lamb's blood. So that would have been cool, but it didn't happen and it wouldn't have worked. So moving on. Then Franklin, not a president, but close enough, and I will take any excuse to mention this fact, he liked to take air baths, which was just sitting around in the nude. He would, he would just spend time sitting around naked, preferably outside. He thought

that water baths were often too bracing, but the, but sitting around naked in the air really stirred his constitution. What a sensitive dude. indeed and yeah this isn't from a weirdest thing episode but relatedly i found out that john quincy adams really liked skinny dipping in the potomic river early in the mornings so there there may have been people who saw the president in the buff that might have been a thing that regularly happened back in the day also again not part of a weirdest thing episode but since we talked about dueling keeping you from office in tennessee I promise that I would talk about a very dual happy president.

And indeed, Andrew Jackson fought more than 100 duels in his lifetime and definitely killed at least one dude. Like we know for sure, at least one of those duels ended in murder. But, you know, he wasn't good enough for Tennessee, but he was good enough for America. Yeah. So another amazing, maybe the wrong way to put it, but another fact about Andy Jackson is that his critics used to call him a jackass. And instead of letting that get him down, I guess, he actually reclaimed the title and turned it into a positive persona for himself. He saw the donkey as a stubborn and strong and willing symbol for himself. But anyway, that ended up evolving into a larger symbol for the Democratic Party, which Andrew Jackson was part of.

So a lot of people probably wonder how the Democrats ended up being associated with donkeys and the Republicans were associated with elephants. So Andrew Jackson is kind of the beginning of the story, but the symbols didn't actually become mainstream until later in the 1870s. And it was thanks to one pretty notorious political cartoonist at the time, Thomas Nast. Just a note on political cartoons, we don't really see them as often today because fewer people read print and newspapers. But back in the 1800s, and early 1900s, political cartoonists were extremely influential during elections. And Thomas Nast was among the most influential. So he drew a cartoon for Harper's Magazine, depicting the Democratic Party as a donkey, kicking

the remnants of a dead lion, which he was, he meant to symbolize the remnants of the Lincoln administration. He was a big ape Lincoln fan. So he continued using the donkey to represent the Democrats, and eventually it just stuck. I don't think the party ever officially claimed it as their mascot, as Andrew Jackson had, but it became the mascot in the eyes of the American people. As for the Republicans and the elephant, that might have also been nasty motivated. In 1874, he drew a cartoon showing the Republicans as an elephant, but it also might have come from a play on the phrase seeing the elephant, which was used to refer to the Union Army's victory in the Civil War a few decades earlier.

Obviously, this put the Republicans in a pretty good light because, you know, elephants, mighty, strong, pretty cool animal. So they did adopt the elephant as their mascot. All right. Get out and vote or stay in and vote. But do it. If you are eligible and able, vote, vote. I hope that you enjoyed these weird and silly and hopefully not stressful or depressing much of the time, election-related facts. And we will see you. on the other side.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popseye.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio

engineering by just Bode. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or

pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.