Adjunct Professor Jerry Goldfeder co-authored an op-ed for the New York Law Journal about election law.
In 1960 Richard Nixon and John Kennedy battled for New York’s all-important 45 electoral college votes. Nixon proved more popular among Republicans than Kennedy was among Democrats—Nixon received 3,446,419 votes on the GOP line to Kennedy’s 3,423,909 on the Democratic line, a margin for Nixon of some 23,000 votes. In any other state in the union, Nixon would have won the state and all of its electoral college votes. That would have resulted in 264 electoral college votes for Nixon—just short of the magic number of 269 that year—and 258 for Kennedy.
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Fortunately for Kennedy, New York had—and still has—“fusion,” a procedure that permits a candidate to run on multiple lines and whose vote totals from the various parties are added together. In 1960, the Liberal party (which lost its party status in 2002) cross-endorsed Kennedy, and he received 406,176 votes on that line—enough to make up Nixon’s margin in the Republican-Democratic contest. Thus, Kennedy won the popular vote in New York, and with it the state’s electoral college vote. The result was 303 electoral college votes for Kennedy and only 219 for Nixon, a decisive margin that avoided a political crisis. New York’s fusion laws are back in the news.