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Maine's Election Date

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Everett S. Brown
Affiliation:
University of Michigan

Extract

Periodically the cry, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” attracts public attention to the fact that Maine, alone among the states, elects representatives to Congress in September instead of November. How this came to be is fairly well known. But why does Maine persist in her aloofness?

Section 3 of the act of February 2, 1872, for the apportionment of representatives to Congress among the several states, provided: “That the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-six, is hereby fixed and established as the day, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, for the election of Representatives and Delegates to the Forty-fifth Congress; and the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every second year thereafter, is hereby fixed and established as the day for the election, in each of said States and Territories, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress commencing on the fourth day of March next thereafter.”

Type
American Government and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1935

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References

1 17 Statutes at Large, 28.

2 Congressional Record, 43d Cong., 2d Sess., 1070.

3 Ibid., 2016.

4 18 Statutes at Large, 400–401. Approved March 3, 1875.

5 Thorpe, (ed.), Constitutions, III, 1649Google Scholar.

6 Perley, Jeremiah, Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings of the Convention of Delegates … for the Purpose of Forming a Constitution for the State of Maine (Portland, 1820), p. 98Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 98–99.

8 Thorpe, (ed.), Constitutions, III, 1665Google Scholar.

9 Legislative Record of the Eighty-sixth Legislature of the State of Maine (1933), pp. 168–181, 220227Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as Legislative Record.)

10 Ibid., p. 50.

11 Ibid., p. 137.

12 The Democratic governor, Louis J. Brann, was reëlected in 1934, thus adding to the list.

13 Legislative Record, pp. 168–171.

14 Ibid., pp. 171–180.

15 Ibid., pp. 180–181.

16 Ibid., pp. 220–223.

17 Ibid., p. 227.

18 Ibid., p. 245.

19 Daily Kennebec Journal, February 13 (Stenographic report of the proceedings).

20 Ibid., February 16.

21 Ibid., February 22.

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