Maine’s recent senate election involved some seemingly counterintuitive math, while simultaneously providing significant food for thought.
America’s Declaration of Independence includes a preamble stating, among other things, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If any or all of the 56 signers of that document were alive today, hopefully they’d have long since extended those inalienable rights to all people, regardless of gender, race, or pigmentation. But perhaps that’s wishful thinking, since 85% of the wealthy white male landowners who endorsed the Declaration in 1776 owned slaves, or profited from slavery.
The inalienable rights the founders were referring to don’t apply to less tangible things, though. Unlike human beings, all numbers are not created equal, and that was bad news for Maine’s soon-to-be ex-Senator Susan Collins.
Ballots in the just-completed election were cast in approximately 448 different municipalities. Ms. Collins, who was poised to become the longest-serving US senator in Maine’s 206-year United States history, received a majority of the votes in 336 of those places. Winning the state’s voting precincts by a three- to-one ratio suggests the veteran legislator should have breezed to a sixth term. The opponent she routed? He’d most likely head back to the oblivion of his northern Maine roots, perhaps returning to work logging in the same forests where he’d toiled for years prior to his entering politics.
But when it comes to election-related numbers, size matters.
While Troy Jackson won only a third of the number of Maine locales Collins did, he carried the day in Portland, South Portland, Lewiston, Scarborough, Brunswick, Bangor, Saco, Auburn, Windham, Gorham, Biddeford, Westbrook, Sanford, York, Falmouth, Augusta, Kennebunk, Wells, Cape Elizabeth, Waterville, Topsham, Cumberland, Yarmouth, Freeport, Kittery, and Old Orchard Beach. And not coincidentally, those places are, in that order, the twenty-six Maine communities where voting was the heaviest. The largest Maine electoral district in which Collins outpolled Jackson was the town of Standish, where 5319 votes were cast.
According to results posted in the New York Times, Collins outpolled Jackson by 63 percent in Maxfield (population 89), 69 percent in Willimantic (population 134), and a staggering 78 percent in Moose River (population 188). Unfortunately for the outgoing senator, the total number of ballots in those three communities was 243. That’s less than ten percent of the 2550 that were cast in Kennebunkport, which Jackson won by 21 percent. Collins actually got 100% of the votes in two Maine communities, but a total of just a half-dozen people total voted in Square Lake unorganized territory (three) and T15 R6 WELS (the other three). Collins won 45 of the 47 Maine municipalities where fewer than 100 people voted, but the combined number of votes in all those communities (2642), was less than the small towns of Raymond (2840), Gardiner (2874), and North Yarmouth (2875), each of which was carried by Jackson.
Winning an election while carrying just a quarter of a state’s municipalities seems implausible. But then, so does having a legislative body like the US Senate. America’s least-populated state gets the same representation as California does, even though there are 66 Golden Staters for every resident of Wyoming. There are 49 times as many Texans as Vermonters, and 32 times as many Floridians as Alaskans, yet each of those states gets the same complement of U.S. Senators: two.
America’s government is far from perfect. But it still beats the heck out of autocracy, theocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, and any other currently-available ocracies.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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