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Caprice's Maps and What-Not

I get the impression Middlesex was a lot more socially diffuse from that.
This isn't even the worst of it.

I'm really liking this way of mapping nonpartisan elections, @Caprice .
Thanks! I'll have a map of the winner by town for, say, the congressional single-winner elections, but this will have to do for the technically dual-winner system used here for presidential electors. (The General Court chose one from each district, then two at-large out of everyone who hadn't gotten any votes, which had to be patched as soon as they received the results, since literally everyone they could think of was disqualified.)

God, Massachusetts used to have a disaster of an election code.
 
I've forgotten the details, but what was that one early 19th century presidential election where it was something like 'each district elects electors who elect the presidential electors but there are also runoffs and statewide electors and...'

I don't know of any one state in any one election that had all of those, but:
- Tennessee had electors choose its electors by district in 1796 and maybe 1800;
- New Hampshire had runoffs in at least 1788 and 1792;
- At various times, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, and New York have had one elector per congressional district and two at-large.
 
Not sure why there weren't any votes polled from Cape Cod, but oh well.

Could it be to do with the town charter reserving all land ownership to the Province, with the inhabitants only holding the land in tenure?
 
Could it be to do with the town charter reserving all land ownership to the Province, with the inhabitants only holding the land in tenure?
Perhaps. There was a property qualification for voting, as follows:
Every male person, being twenty-one years of age, and resident in any particular town in this commonwealth for the space of one year next preceding, having a freehold estate within the same town, of the annual income of three pounds, or any estate of the value of sixty pounds, shall have a right to vote. . .
 
Perhaps. There was a property qualification for voting, as follows:

That'll do it, it's Wiki so take with a pinch of salt but:

The act of incorporation provided that inhabitants of Provincetown could be land holders, but not land owners. They received a quit claim to their property, but the Province retained the title. The land was to be used as it had been from the beginning of the colony — a place for the making of fish. All resources, including the trees, could be used for that purpose.[8] In 1893 the Massachusetts General Court changed the Town's charter, giving the townspeople deeds to the properties they held, while still reserving unoccupied areas.[12]
 
Next district, comprising the entirety of present-day Maine. Daniel Coney managed to make it all the way to legislative consideration entirely off the inland Lincoln County vote.

1788-pres-maine.png

1602005662390.png
 
The penultimate district, comprising Bristol, Dukes, and Nantucket. Dukes somehow managed to share exactly zero candidates with the rest of the district, which is honestly rather impressive.

1788-pres-bristol.png

1602010576645.png
 
I can only assume Massachusetts used that system where the candidate's name was written on the ballot you entered, and the people counting the votes laid them end to end without remembering how much bigger John Hancock's signature was.

I mean, people did handwrite their ballots, so there's at least something to that joke.
 
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