A Presidential Election Decided by California
For this President’s Day, here’s a tale of California’s decisive role in one presidential election.
The 1916 election between Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson and Republican challenger Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes was one of the closest in American history. The voters of California would decide the man who would be president and, collectively, those voters were divided.
The election was held in the shadow of war in Europe. President Wilson argued for neutrality. He ran on the slogan: He kept us out of war.” Hughes, former New York Governor, and future Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, had won the Republican nomination as a compromise candidate to unite the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party.
With Hughes winning the big electoral vote states of the day in the Northeast and most of the Midwest, the race came down to the 13 Electoral Votes in the Golden State. California’s neighbor to the north, Oregon, had gone for Hughes, the only western state besides South Dakota to do so, and if California joined in, Hughes would be president.
Taking the ink out of signatures
This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
A few weeks ago, a statewide ballot initiative petition signed by a California voter named Michael Ni was delivered — quietly and without fanfare — to the clerk’s office in San Mateo County.
Strange as it may sound, this is no exaggeration: Ni’s John Hancock may reshape American politics forever.
Ni did not sign his name on a piece of paper. His signature was electronic. He wrote his name on the petition (a measure to legalize and tax cannabis in California) using the touch screen of his iPhone. The signature was then delivered to the county clerk on a flash drive, one of those small memory storage devices you use to back up files on your computer.
In doing this, Ni — the co-founder of a Silicon Valley start-up that has developed a technology for electronic signature-gathering — was seeking to challenge the rules that have governed the American political economy since the Progressive era.