Recent polls show Hillary Clinton out in front in Maine’s 1st Congressional District. They also show Donald Trump ahead in the 2nd Congressional District. The state’s split identity has drawn renewed attention not only to the theme of “Two Maines” but also to the state’s pioneering and nearly unique system of apportioning its electoral votes.
If the present trend holds, the outcome will mark only the second occasion in modern times when any state will have divided its votes by congressional district and the first since 1828 when Maine has done so.
Though in our nation’s early years Massachusetts, Maryland and Maine split their electoral votes by congressional districts, the system was by the 1830s abandoned in favor of a winner take all or “at large” approach. This remained in effect throughout the country for some 130 years, and it still is the predominant method.
Maine in 1969 became the first state to at least partially restore the older system. The original bill called for the creation of four districts, with the winner in each then entitled to a vote in the Electoral College. By the time the bill made it out of committee, it provided for one vote allocated to the winner in each of the two congressional districts but with our two remaining votes going to the statewide winner.
The Maine law — particularly in this year’s close presidential contest — is winning deserved interest from other parts of the country, not to mention the candidates themselves. The bill was the brainchild of Rep. Glenn Starbird Jr., its sole sponsor, according to Rep. John Martin, who was then in his third term as a member of the Maine House.
Starbird, a member of the Penobscot Nation and a millworker at the Forster Manufacturing plant in Mattawamkeag, was then in his third term as a Democrat from Kingman Township. I first met Starbird in 1967 as a teenager who often frequented State House deliberations. I found his observations intriguing, laced with classical and historical perspectives. It came as little surprise that Starbird likely had an awareness of the early, obscure Maine practice of casting votes for president by congressional districts.
No doubt this inspired his bill to bring it back to life. Action on it was notably uncontroversial. It was unanimously adopted by the Republican-controlled Legislature after Starbird’s assiduous groundwork within his own State Government Committee to which the bill had been referred.
As Martin recalled recently, the bill was passed “with the assumption that other states would follow suit.”
So far, however, only Nebraska has done so, it adopting the same method as Maine in 1991, and it was not until 2008 that the Cornhusker state became the first in modern times to in fact split its votes under this system. This occurred after one of its three congressional districts voted for Barack Obama while the rest of the state went for John McCain.
In at least two states, citizen initiatives have been advanced to adopt a similar approach. Colorado voters, however, rejected it at the polls in 2004, while a petition campaign launched in California in 2007 did not garner enough signatures to make it onto the ballot. One reason for the failure to gain traction in more populous states is that the apportionment of congressional districts there has typically resulted in a partition that renders nearly all districts definitively safe for either one party or the other. That means presidential candidates might be more likely to overlook an entire state because campaigning there might not make a big difference.
The last time our paths crossed was in the late 1980s, when I had invited Starbird for a conversation at my law office in Farmington. In our conference room, memorabilia proclaiming the 1947 lecture at Farmington State Teachers College by the “Famous Russian Democratic Statesman,” Alexander Kerensky caught his attention.
“I saw Kerensky speak at Orono that same week in 1947, when I was a student there,” he recalled.
Kerensky, in exile in America since his ouster in 1917 by the Bolsheviks, had by the time Starbird encountered him in the 1940s become the symbolic hope for those wishing to restore some form of democracy in the Soviet Union. I have sometimes thought back on my last meeting with Starbird and this vicarious symbolic intersection between himself and Kerensky, both dedicated exponents of democratic procedures.
Starbird, who died of cancer in 1995 at age 66, will never be remembered as much as Kerensky. His advancement, however, of an election system that is this year commanding some attention elsewhere is deservedly not forgotten. I hope he may also, like Kerensky, be remembered not so much as the leader of a forlorn cause but of one that had yet to be achieved.
Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by email at pmills@myfairpoint.net.