The Chaotic American Election With Half a Billion Votes
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- Опубліковано 1 чер 2024
- A 1964 election in Illinois had over 500 million votes. How on Earth did that happen?
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00:00 - Intro
01:13 - State-wide elections
02:12 - Illinois' redistricting crisis
03:21 - Ground News
04:23 - Setting up the chaotic election
05:47 - The results
08:07 - After the election
Music Used:
"Long Stroll" and "Sneaky Snitch" by Kevin MacLeod
found at www.incompetech.com
Sources:
- “Democrats Sweep House in Illinois; Get Two‐thirds of Seats in Almost Complete Tally.” The New York Times, December 4, 1964.
- Green, Paul M. (1987). Legislative Redistricting in Illinois: An Historical Analysis (Report). Illinois Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation.
- "Newspaper Supplement Explains At-Large House Vote." The Southern Illinoisan, October 25, 1964.
- Wehrwein, Austin, "Ballot in Illinois Big as Bath Towel." The New York Times, October 29, 1964.
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Hi.
Commenting 4 algorithm
@EmpeorTigerstar WHAT IF THIS HAD HAPPENED IN 2020?
It's not every day you see somebody get elected with 0.41% of the vote, but William J. "Bill" Cunningham did it by having the 177th most votes. Perhaps even more impressive was that Adlai Stevenson III got the most votes...at 0.46%.
This is not clear though, because each person could vote for many people, and for example if there were two candidates, who everyone who voted for one voted for the other as well, and got 50% of voters, each would get 25% of the vote despite half of the voters approving them
@@goatgamer001I don’t understand your example,
If there were 2 candidates, let’s assume there are 10 voters, they each have 2 votes and vote both of the candidates, each candidate would then have 10 votes out of 20, both of them would have 50% of the vote, NOT 25%. You count the votes, not the voter
Theres a road in springfield named after Stevenson lol
Adlai Stevenson the First was Grover Cleveland’s Vice President
Of course, someone who everyone voted for would only get somewhere between 0.565% and 0.847% of the vote. So getting over 0.4% isn't half bad!
Illinois constitution writers inserting this clause when the state has 50,000 people: "this will be perfectly manageable"
Illinois was on its second constitutional by that point
It was actually only added in the 50s! This was the first redistricting cycle under the new constitution.
@@elli6220 Illinois was on the 1870 constitution at this point
Illinois had more people than that in 1964 more ;ike 6 million
@@zed381no5 yes but the redistricting amendment was new.
Candidate: "I demand a recount!"
Counters: *collectively commit seppuku*
The election that had a americillion votes.
As a proud Illinoisian, this is incredibly on brand for our state government
hey cmon we’re doing better now, pritzkers kinda decent and the recent chicago mayors just suck instead of being corrupt
@@cassidy_cdidn't pritzker remove all the toilets in his house to not pay taxes or something?
@@jmjedi923ya and he lives in Florida
@@jmjedi923 what?
@@jmjedi923 tbh pretty tame for a politician lmao, still better than like 90% of current governors
As the person who wrote this page on Wikipedia -- didn't expect to see it featured here! Not complaining tho; glad more people can find out about one of my favorite elections of all time.
Woah, thanks for your work brotha
Opened it up while watching this, very good article
In section 2 paragraph 2, "Chicago Better Government committee" should be "Better Government Association", wikilinked.
@@TamzinHadasa SOFIXIT
@@elli6220 {{done}}
Most normal American election:
2020 be like:
@@hagoryopi2101For real
Since it was an at-large election, they had a chance to use normal party list proportional representation like so many democracies. Either out of ignorance or spite, they said “Nah.” They chose a system that was both less democratic and more complicated.
@@hagoryopi2101 lol what happened in 2020?
@@holdenennis Some german states not only have at-large elections for their local council, they also have up to 3 votes per Person for one candidate...
The fact that what amounts to approval voting happened as a result of a redistributing fight must be one of the most stereotypically American tales I’ve heard in a while
Cumulative voting and approval are different. Cumulative being semi proportional and have a limit to the number of votes to be cast whereas approval lets you vote only once per candidate for as many candidates as you want which means that one faction will likely take all the seats.
@@catmonarchist8920 Since the number of votes you could cast in Illinois was the same as the the number of seats, it's a non-proportional system. if every voter was allowed less votes than the number of seats, it would've been semi-proportional.
@@lllluka How can it be approval voting if you limit the number of votes? It's limited plurality voting like the parliament of Gibraltar, then
@@catmonarchist8920 I didn't say it's approval voting. I was just saying that the system Illinois used in that election was non-proportional
@@catmonarchist8920Approval voting is also only for single seat, not multiple seats, because it makes no sense for multiple seats.
Glory to Illinois. Glory to Arstotzka.
Kolechia 🤢🤡😂🏳️🌈
You will both be crushed by the mighty boot of Obristan!
Obristan above all!
Sorry, the name on your handle and the name of your channel don't match up. gonna have to deny you
Obristan (Iowa) above all
Being from Illinois, I’ll admit I just assumed that Chicago just got a little sloppy in its election shenanigans.
I mean let's be honest, with that election it would be so simple to do so.
Illinois has a really long track record when it comes to political shenanigans
Yea the '60 election for example
I wish my county could join Missouri and leave Chicago's stranglehold on Illinois behind. Either that or give Chicago to Michigan or something, they already have Detroit so what's one more?
@@MintyLime703but Chicago is separated from Michigan. By a lake.
@@MintyLime703 As someone from Missouri, I do not want this to happen.
@mintylime2563 as someone from Chicago, just give half the city to Mexico. There's so many of us here that if that happened, there would be no difference.
5:30 - This happened in the Canadian Province of New Brunswick in 1987, complete 58/58 seat blowout for the Liberal Party. The Premier had to appoint some of his own members to be the Opposition.
wow! that's very remarkable
This has happened in US states before, mainly in the South before the civil rights movement, where everyone was a Democrat.
Canada, where a Treadaou can be PM for two life times.
It also happened in the 1935 general election for the Prince Edward Island Legislative Assembly.
a coward's move, should've just ruled with a 100% majority and see what happened
It’s funny how incredibly close they came to a normal proportional vote but they decided to make it weird and give the winner 2/3rds of the seats
They didn't come close at all. The Democrats got 52.05% of the votes, but got all 118 candidates elected. (Likely) because of the straight ticketing, all Democratic candidates got more votes than all Republican candidates, with there being over a 70,000 vote gap between the worst performing Democrat (Lawrence DiPrima, 2,262,258 votes), and the best performing republican (the aforementioned Earl D. Eisenhower, 2,191,826 votes).
It seems very likely to me that had they not made it 'weird', and allowed each party to field 177 candidates, then the Republicans would have been completely shut out and won 0 seats, despite getting 47.95% of the votes in the real life election.
Without that 2/3rds cap, the straight ticketing in practise makes it first past the post (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting) at a party and state level, rather than at a candidate and constituency level.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Illinois_House_of_Representatives_election
@@stephengibbons4680they got close in method, not in result.
They just made it so it was mathematically impossible for a single party to get more than 2/3rds of the total seats.
Yeah in a perfect world this could have been transformed into proportional representation, but that's not how this worked as each voter had a vote for each seat and the top vote earners were directly elected, just like in a multi-member district. It's one of the most disproportionate systems one could think of.
It's worth noting Australia has compulsory voting so it's not a surprise that our turnout is higher because people don't like getting fines :P
Edit: To explain this to the three people reading, all that is required is that if you are a registered voter (which is also compulsory but rarely checked) you turn up to vote in your district and have your name struck from the list so that the electoral commission knows that you have attended the vote, but you can just spoil the ballot by scribbling on it or not putting a number for all candidates as we also have preferential voting.
But if you think you're protesting the system by doing that you're delusional...
Though the point about Aboriginal sovereignty is actually a good one
Well that's a good system, if you don't want to vote then pay back the money that was wasted on you while organizing the elections
@@Spacey_keyHow would one stay neutral in the election?
@@PretzelLunarempty ballots obviously
informal vote; don't fill out your ballot properly @@PretzelLunar
@@PretzelLunarvote for the cooler name
I think one of the things that made Johnson popular in 1964 was that JFK was assassinated less than a year prior and the nation was still grieving. Also, had Kennedy not been assassinated, he was generally well liked across the country by that time (except by Lee Harvey Oswald ;) ) and most likely would have won 1964 anyways but the added emotional support from a party that tragically lost its leader in a public way less than a year earlier I’d say was a bigger push than the Daisy Ad as it was known.
So basically the entire state was multi-member district with absolutely insane number of candidates, wow 😮
When comparing The 2020 turnout to that of other elections in other countries it should be noted that those countries can have huge disparities in their own turnout
In France for example, while the turnout of the 2022 presidential election was more or less the average for such an election, the regional elections a year prior had seen a record low of 25% turnout, and the 2019 EU election saw a little over 50% turnout, which was seen as quite high compared to previous elections
The regional elections happened during COVID though so it's quite understandable the turnout was low. He did compare it with other national elections such as presidential and/or parliamentary elections depending if the country has a presidential system (US, FR) or parliamentary (AU, UK, IN)
European elections are not seen as particularly important in French politics and happen outside national election cycles so they really have low turnout
Voting is compulsory in Australia, so that's an unfair comparison as well.
The 2020 election was fake and gay.
To be fair, the same is true for US elections as well. I don't know the exact numbers, but in general less people vote for legislative elections - state-level or even congress ("Midterms") - because it's seen as less important, much like regional, state elections (or I guess EU elections) in Europe, presidential system or not.
@@BasedEngineerNo
As a long time resident of Illinois, this is just a normal day in Illinois
Imagine having to count that. In 1963. There are no computers to help you. You have to do it by hand. I guess in 2000 Florida saw that and thought it looked fun
The first electronic calculator was invented in the 1880s by a man named Herman Hollerith. It was called the Electronic Tabulating Machine and was built for the specific purpose of counting the 1890 US Census. The US constitution requires a census every 10 years and the 1880 census had taken 8 years to process, meaning the 1890 census would probably have taken longer than 10 years if the government hadn't used electronic calculators to help. Hollerith's invention was wildly successful and the company he founded later became known as IBM, one of the most successful computer companies in history. With this in mind, I imagine electronic vote counting had achieved slightly more widespread use by the time of the 1964 Illinois election, 83 years later.
@@raakymusic4336 ok well I’m sure it wasn’t as easy to count as it is now
@@raakymusic4336Shoutout to my man Herman Hollerith
I recently read about this. As a resident of Illinois, this actually doesn't surprise me. We do have the most governors who have gone to prison, after all (Kerner being one of them). 🤣
As my coworker from Chicago says, “vote early and vote often”
I live in Illinois and I didn’t even know this happened, but I’m not surprised at all that it happened here lmao
Thank you Emperor, we're happy to be supporting your work. For anyone interested, check out the link above!
Ain’t no way
I have family that lives in Illinois
He always says “ they spend 4 years in office and then 4 years in prison”
Wow, America really seems to do everything to avoid voting proportional representation with party lists.
STV is better.
@@IkeOkerekeNews but it still lets you vote only for candidates, not parties. A combination of both would probably be useful, similar to how Germany or New Zealand are doing it.
@@kosinusify
I don't really care for political parties.
@@IkeOkerekeNews well, some people do. Especially in a multi-party system, one might want to vote for one party's platform, even though they might dislike a particular candidate.
@@kosinusify
A party's platform is tied to the candidates they choose present to the public, especially in European systems where there is far greater internal cohesion and discipline. Therefore, if you don't like the candidate, it is very likely that you don't like the party as well.
THANK YOU!!! This is one of my favorite quirky elections to tell people about. I've been editing state politics pages for Illinois on Wikipedia and it's been great (and tiring) going through all the election results and posting them on Wikipedia.
I do the same for Texas! It’s a fascinating process, but I agree that it can be very exhausting. I’ve made it back to 1972 for Congress, 2004 for the State Senate, and 1992 for the State House, but I’ve gotten caught up in other projects, so I don’t know when I’ll get back to those pages.
Illinois has never recovered from this disastrous decision.
When i understand it correctly, all local Elections in Germany (at least in my State) are at large Election. For example, my Hometown has 900 inhabitants and the Townhall has 12 Members. SPD got 1370 Votes winning 3 Seats and the local Voters Association got 4252 Votes winning 9 Seats. In the state Capital, ca. 100,000 vere voting during that Election. There were 5.7 Million valid Votes.
In a sense, yes, but you don't have a strictly voting district-based system like in America, instead you have (in most German states) mixed-member proportional representation. In the 1964 Illinois election the Democratic party got 52,9% of the votes but 66% of the seats, because each member represents a district. This cannot happen with proportional representation, as the entire city (or state) is considered a single district. In mixed-member proportional representation, you have members representing districts, and members representing parties (proportionally to the votes at state level). If the members representing districts throw off the proportion of party votes, additional members are added as party representatives to even it out. Thus you can't get such skewed numbers as in the US.
If you want another election like this, check out the Minnesota House of Representatives race of 1932. Delegation went from 9 Republican 1 Farmer Laborer in 1930 election to 5 Farmer Laborer, 3 Republican, 1 Democrat in 1932.
EDIT: I mean another election in terms of doing the "Every candidate for all 9 House seats on one statewide ballot at once, top 9 vote getters win a seat" thing.
Something nice to point out, is that in some countries voting is less of a right, and more of a obligation imposed by the state, like paying tax, because if you don't vote you have to pay a fine, and no one likes paying fines so that inflates the voter turn out of some countries.
At least for the UK and France the two examples I remember that's not the case though.
That sounds like a great way to get a lot of low-information voters that don't care about policy to give power to the loudest politicians.
@@jamesmclemore9123 Actually, never thought about that.
@@mnm1273 Yep, France and the Uk don't have mandatory voting, but Brazil and Australia are examples (i actually don't know if Australia fines it's voters when they don't vote, but they do have mandatory voting)
@@jamesmclemore9123Yep. Sometimes it's better to have low voter turnout if the people who vote are well-informed and educated. Uneducated voters tends to vote the most famous guy on the ballot because they don't really give a s h i t.
It is super disappointing to me that at large elections don’t really happen anymore.
STV or MMP would be so awesome.
STV at large with nearly 200 candidates? that's worse than cumulative
@@catmonarchist8920and? Chaos is fun
STV is a stupid thing.
@@gustavusadolphus4344then if you don't know the dude dont vote for him. Or maybe an option for "all democratic noninees" at the top with an "EXCEPT" box next to each candidate in that list
@@sirllamaiii9708 The Latvian Parliament does it like that where you write a - next to candidates in the list you don't want. There's also panachage list systems that let you vote for a set number of people which have similar results.
Upon seeing the title I expected a computer underflow error. I was pleasantly surprised.
Cosmic rays
"We couldn't complete the district map because of cosmic rays"@@Kromiball
Love your vids man. Keep it up
I thought that this was the cause of a single-event upset that turned a low number in the voting system to an extremely high number.
Amazing video 😊
One tiny correction: Before 1970, voters could vote for one, two, or three candidates for the Illinois general assembly, but in some areas (like the Chicago suburbs in Cook County), you could cast 2 votes for one and 1 for another, but in Chicago you could only case 1, 1 1/2, or 3 votes per candidate, not 2.
Great video, make more like this
great video👍
Honestly that’s a good clause in the Illinois constitution. Can’t decide, fine, let the people decide who shall make the maps. Good concept
Imagine an at large vote for a national vote for all the congressmen in the House of Representatives and all the Senators. That would really suck but it’d be funny
Manageable with computers
Part of me is morbidly curious about how this would look on a national level in the modern day.
Well, I can guarantee you that you'd see riots and State Secession. Imagine your representative being from a state halfway across the country.
That's almost as bad as trying to vote for State House of Representative candidates in New Hampshire.... There's 1 per 3500 people so most towns are electing more than 5 and they generally aren't party affiliated and will just walk down streets to campaign in their "district"(town).
Thanks for doing a video on illinois history
A lot of legends in Illinois politics were on this ballot including Harold Washington and Adlai Stevenson
I love these videos
Thank you.
Very Cool video, I think a video on the worst presidential nominees would be interesting, and would like to see your opinion.
It is worth considering that Australia has a compulsory voting so that will almost certainly increase turnout. Since that was introduced the turnout has been around 91-96% before the introduced it was a lot less.
It was under 25% when voting was optional. But even now, technically in Australia you don't have to vote if you're sick on election day and the courts have ruled that a doctor is not required to verify that. All you have to do is tell the electoral commission you were sick when they ask why you didn't vote.
Nice to see
We absolutely need MORE elections like this.
love the Flintstones reference with Fred Rubble
Wow! you have one of the voices of all time.
I don't understand why they didn't just allot seats based on the percentages of votes and then take the highest voted-for candidates to fill those seats lol
well, that would be too smart, wouldn't it?
We should do this again I think. Only because it would be funny
Do the 1974 Senate election New Hampshire where the winner won by 2 votes
Lmao what did the ballot look like with all those candidates
I'm honestly surprised I never heard of this; I've lived in Springfield all my life.
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
Good video with an unbelievable story. For future reference, please try not use the word "and" when reading a number. I know that many people do this but it would be good practice from not doing it.
Interesting Lee enough I was actually reading about this the other day
Who thought this was a good idea? People literally cant know more than a 100 people.
I was literally just reading up on this last week. Very fascinating election that I would've loved to have seen online in the age of social media.
And to the people jumping to conclusion, no. This wasn't any kind of corruption or illegal voting.
Floridian here - I don't want to hear any talk about hanging and dimpled chads ever again after watching this video.
Why is the most surprising part of the stats that it had a pretty even vote with that many votes instead of that it had way more votes than could be possible.
THis is awesome.
To think this happened when my Grandma came over from Germany to Illinois.
Proud Illinois tradition: Vote early and vote often!
I'm extremely happy to have just learned about Adlai Stevenson III and Earl Eisenhower.
And here I thought it was just the usual for Illinois politics: the dead voting.
The funny thing is that it almost happened twice… and still could happen again
Blah blah blah hlah two nickels
This was amazing, I was expecting to be click baited.
In North Carolina the chambers are co-equal branches between the House of Reps and the Senate. No where in statutes or the constitution does it say anything about a higher/lower chamber.
Higher and lower chamber are traditional terms. Higher chambers have fewer seats and are usually the final area laws must pass (like the senate), lower chambers introduce the laws and have way more seats. It doesn’t mean they’re unequal.
I would love a clean house like this to be honest where everyone's seat is up for grabs.
the “what” at 0:44 is absolutely priceless
That is wacky.
Seems like it might be interesting but I had a hard time concentrating on the spoken word with the background music being almost loud enough to be foreground music.
This is not related to the vid, but your user and pfp Emperor Tigerstar, lol I know that cat. I subbed just for that name.
This is interesting but the title is misleading.
Each Illinois resident voted once, but on the ballot they could vote for 177 seats.
That’s literally the point of the video.
@@EmperorTigerstar Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the video and haven't heard of this election before.
When I read the title, I thought it was saying half a billion people voted in it, not that each person voted for 177 offices.
Maybe I just misinterpreted the title when I read it.
I thought this video was going to be about the 2020 election lol
You know what would increase voter turnout? Giving people the time to actually go voting! Don't just stick to on specific date and screw over the working population because they don't have the time to vote but rather set it on a Sunday or make it a national holiday, so that people can actually cast their vote in one of the worlds most important elections.
early voting exists to my knowledge in every state
Hey Tigerstar, I heard you use MS Paint to make animated mapping videos. I have a question, if your mapping a war you would usually make the video be based around 'every day' of the conflict for example. How do you change the text in MS Paint without ruining the text place?
It's days like this that make you wonder if the supreme court just wants to be that guy to test out the most insane political processes because they have the ability to do so and they would find it funny or make the legislator actually do their job so that it won't happen again.
1:14 This needs to be an awful maps candidate. What have they done to my poor Texas?
As an Illinoisan I’m not surprised
Having seen posts from Illinois Republicans accusing Chicago Democrats of casting votes with dead people's names, I was assuming that's what happened for this and I was like, "was it really THAT bad?"
At-large state representation makes SO much more sense. Imagine how many votes could be tallied if California, Texas, Florida, or New York did this in 2024. Could be upwards of half a trillion
Proud to be an Illinoisan
My phone is asking if I want to translate your comment into english.
@@1dalea same here XD
could you imagine if there was an at large election for the US house of representatives and the Senate lol, it's a shame they limited the votes though, I wonder what they would've done if there was literally a 100% house of representatives and senate in a state
we're freaking geniuses out here!!!
I gotta say I wasnt even surprised when it was Illinois
As a 1967 model myself... It is definitely More than 50 years....
And here, in Bulgaria, the president was elected with 1 539 650 votes. 💀
man i really need to get back to studying🤧
Anybody else see that this was in Illinois and just assume that it was corruption?
0:50 "nearly 50 years ago" wired way to say nearly 60.
This seems pretty similar to a normal parliamentary election, right? Especially when people are just voting for a party to represent them.
>at-large election
So you guys did party list voting with a single tick or a few preferences, right? Right?
Illinois: ...
Omg I love living in Illinois
God bless Illinois election shenanigans, wouldn't be illinois if this didn't happen
I think the Electoral College contributes to low voter turnout in the US. If you live in a deep blue district in California or a deep red district in Alabama, then there's really no point in turning out.
In a direct democracy where a few major cities determine the vote, why would you turn out anyways?
"I think the Electoral College contributes to low voter turnout in the US." It does not.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714100% does for me. I don't vote in my state because it's so one sided
@@hagoryopi2101stupid argument if you consider the implications. Why should your vote weigh more than a vote from a city just because you live in a farm in a middle of nowhere?
I don't think that what you describe is necessarily the Electoral College's fault, moreso the fact that in 48 out 50 States, the electors are voted in a "winner takes all" approach, which is really stupid to me.
This might actually be the worst way to do an election
First of all, even though I’m a Nebraskan, I don’t work on a farm. Ok? Good. I didn’t know that Nebraska was the only us state to not have an upper or lower senate