For my election-junkie readers, a few little bits of electoral trivia I've picked up over the past couple months:

As all election junkies know, only 48 of the 50 states use a winner-take-all system to assign their electoral votes. In Maine and Nebraska, two votes are assigned to the candidate with the most votes statewide and the remaining votes are assigned by congressional district. Although Nebraska is one of the most reliably Republican states in the union, there is some talk that Obama might win one of its electoral votes (the one for the 2nd congressional district, which more or less corresponds with the city of Omaha).

In 1892, its first election year as a state, North Dakota had three electoral votes, and it gave each one to a different candidate. Third-party candidate Populist James Weaver won 8.5% of the vote that year, and it was sufficiently concentrated that he earned 22 electoral votes for it. One of these was in North Dakota, which also awarded a vote each to Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison.

The number of votes a state gets is equal to its representation in Congress. Since every state has two senators and at least one representative, the minimum electoral votes for a state is three, and the more populous states get more. Since new states tend to be less populous than established ones, most states have either 3 or 4 votes in their debut election.

There have been three exceptions to this:

West Virginia, detached from wayward Virginia in the course of the American Civil War debuted in the 1864 election with five electoral votes.

Oklahoma, which remained federally managed "Indian Territory" long after the westward wave of settlement surrounded it, was already fairly well populated when it became a state and thus debuted, in 1908, with seven electoral votes.

Maine, split off from Massachusetts in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise, cast 9 votes in the election later that year. Massachusetts' electoral vote total correspondingly declined from 22 in 1816, to 15 in 1820. After the 1830 census, Maine had 10 votes to Massachusetts' 14. It surprised me to learn that Maine's population was so large relative to Massachusetts'.

(By the way, the map on Wikipedia's page about the 1820 election is incorrect. Its numbers for Maine, Illinois, and Tennessee are all erroneous. A correct map is linked on the talk page.)

1912 was the year Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate. After finishing out McKinley's term and then serving a full term of his own, Roosevelt retired and recommended William Howard Taft as his successor. Taft won the election in 1908, but Roosevelt was unsatisfied and tried to get the nomination back for 1912. When the Republican Party chose to stick with President Taft, Roosevelt formed the Bull Moose Party, splitting the Republican vote and allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the general election with only 42% of the vote.

Roosevelt earned a larger share of the vote than Taft. The relatively small margin (27.4% to 23.2%) was magnified in the Electoral College, where Taft won only two states. Those two, Utah and Vermont, seem an unlikely pair. (They're also alphabetically consecutive, which will amuse Gelmo and possibly Brux.) When viewed in today's context it's hard to imagine two states more unlike. I'm used to the idea that the parties have switched places, so that the states that are blue today were red 100 years ago — it's not an exact match, of course, but McKinley's electoral map in 1896, for example, doesn't look that much different from what a Democrat might have aimed for in 2000 — but Utah and Vermont don't seem like they should match each other, no matter what the color.

And yet, as we've discussed in Benzene before, there is a slight Vermont-Utah connection, in that both Joseph Smith Jr and Brigham Young (as well as several other early Mormon leaders) were born in Vermont.

Speaking of which, I always knew that former 49ers quarterback Steve Young went to school at Brigham Young University and was active in the LDS church, but it wasn't until today that I learned he is a direct descendant of Brigham Young. Steve Young is back in the news in connection with California's Proposition 8, which would amend the state constitution to specify that marriages between members of the same sex are not recognized. The LDS Church has campaigned vigorously in support of the measure, but among the church members actively opposed to it is Barb Young, Steve's wife. Following his usual policy, Steve has declined to make any political statement, but a statement from Barb says: "I am very passionate about this issue and Steve is completely supportive of me and my work for equality. We both love our Church and are grateful that our Church encourages us to vote our conscience. Steve prefers not to get involved politically on any issue no matter what the cause and therefore makes no endorsement."

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