Word: voting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...very happy to vote again for Harry Truman...
...electors, who also posed for an official photograph, got a free lunch, free fountain pens and a chance to meet Governor Thomas E. Dewey.* In Democratic Tennessee there was a mild flurry of excitement. An elector named Preston Parks carried out a vow-and exercised his constitutional right-to vote for the Dixiecrats' J. Strom Thurmond instead of Harry Truman...
Elector Parks's action changed the expected results by one vote-303 for Truman, 189 for Dewey, 39 for Thurmond. In each state the votes were bundled up and mailed off to Congress. There, on Jan. 6, they would be opened and counted. After that-and not before-Harry Truman would have been legally elected President...
...practice of unit voting (i.e., of giving a state's entire block of electoral votes to the candidate with a plurality in that state) always raised the possibility that.a candidate might get a plurality of the popular vote and still lose the election. It had happened three times in the past. Unit voting also canceled the effectiveness of minority voters, encouraged the one-party system in the South, and gave big states undue power at political conventions...
Since the election of Presidents is the privilege of the states, it seemed unlikely that the system of electoral votes would ever be abolished. But a constitutional amendment proposed by Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Texas' Congressman Ed Gossett would eliminate block voting. Under its terms, electoral votes of each state would be divided in proportion to the popular vote, and a mere plurality in the electoral college would be sufficient for election...