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+--- Thread: Why do Maine & Nebraska split their electoral votes? (political games) (/thread-9321.html)
Why do Maine & Nebraska split their electoral votes? (political games) - C C - Nov 5, 2020
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-maine-and-nebraska-split-their-electoral-votes-180976219/
EXCERPTS: . . . The vast majority of states award the entirety of their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most votes statewide—but two notable exceptions exist: Maine and Nebraska, both of which split their electoral votes through what’s known as the “congressional district method.”
Per the nonprofit electoral reform organization FairVote, this system—used in Maine since the 1972 election and in Nebraska since the 1992 race—allocates two electoral votes to the statewide winner but allows each congressional district to award one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in their specific locality. In Maine, this means that two out of four electoral votes can potentially go to someone other than the statewide winner; in Nebraska, three out of five electoral votes remain in play.
According to Savannah Behrmann of USA Today, Maine started splitting its electoral votes after seceding from Massachusetts, which also used the method, in 1820. The state switched to the more commonly used winner-take-all system in 1828. More than a century later, in 1969, Democratic state representative Glenn Starbird Jr. of Maine proposed a return to the older split-vote method. Concerned that Maine’s electoral votes could be awarded to a candidate who received just 34 percent of the state’s popular vote (a potential outcome of three-way races like the 1968 presidential election, which pitted Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace), Starbird introduced a bill that was subsequently unanimously passed by Maine’s Republican-controlled legislature.
[...] In the words of the Associated Press’ Grant Schulte, Nebraska adopted the split-vote system in hopes of attracting “presidential candidates to a state they usually ignore because it’s so reliably conservative.” (MORE - details)