Word: ballots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When it was over, Reagan had won a projected 51% of the popular vote and an overwhelming 44 states, with the staggering total of 489 electoral votes. Carter took 41% of the popular ballot and a mere six states, with 49 electoral votes (Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia...
...Indeed, they had a list of financial supporters three times larger than the Democratic Party's and had proved that they could raise money in $30 and $40 chunks. More remarkable yet, they managed to collect enough signatures in just a few months to put Anderson on the ballot in every state...
Ironically, these accomplishments helped doom him in the end. His effort to raise money and get on the ballot so monopolized his time and talent that he was unable to fulfill the most fundamental requirement of all for an independent: giving the electorate a clearly defined reason to vote for him. Instead, Anderson's campaign spent more tune criticizing Carter's record and Reagan's qualifications than in defining the "Anderson difference...
...since the 1930s, when the Depression brought a spate of voter initiatives to the ballot, have citizens themselves proposed so many new laws-and limits-for government. David Schmidt, editor of Initiative News Report, describes it accurately as "a new national trend to lawmaking at the ballot box." In 18 states and the District of Columbia, voters put on the ballot a total of 42 referendums. Their actions ranged from a nonbinding vote by five southern New Jersey counties to secede from the state to a decision by residents of Washington, D.C., to take a first step toward statehood...
...brought millions of repetitions of a paradox: making a ballot is an intensely private act of enormous public consequence. And scarcely had the electorate sat down to watch itself on TV when it learned what it had done. An incumbent President was resoundingly defeated: the voters had given Ronald Reagan a place in history. The rippling affect of Nov. 4 will be felt for years, yet it all stemmed from choices made in a voting booth, that unique envelope of solitude. This peaceable allocation of vast power was, as ever, the most remarkable aspect of Election...