With litigation going on there as it’s going on now in 2020, things change:
Initially it appeared Republican candidate Richard Nixon had won in the state, as he was 141 votes ahead after the first count.
[2] A court-ordered recount was still underway when Hawaii’s Republican governor signed the certificate from the GOP electors giving the state’s three electoral votes to Nixon.
[2] On the same day, the Democratic electors also issued a certificate awarding the votes to Kennedy.
[3] The final recount showed Kennedy had actually prevailed, forcing the governor to sign the second certificate from the Democratic electors.
[4] Both certificates had arrived in Washington by the time Congress convened in January 1961, with then-Vice President Nixon charged with presiding over a joint session to certify his own election loss. Hearing no objections,
[4] Nixon ordered the Democratic certificate counted and ignored the accompanying Republican certificate,[2] even though it also bore the governor’s signature as required by federal law.
Thanks for the info. Nixon....who I liked in some ways but not in others, since his trip to China was a good thing to do but he was weak in dealing with them - was definitely cheated out of that election.
I lived in NYC and was too young to vote at that time, but JFK was a much more attractive candidate and was actually probably even more conservative and pro-American than most GOPers now.
I was on the train going back from a job interview which I never got to because the news came across the screen in the waiting room that JFK had been shot in Dallas and then not much later that he was dead. I rode back to my neighborhood (UWS) on the train and people were crying and some loony got on ranting that he was glad JFK was dead. Some other people on the train literally picked up this guy and threw him off at the next stop.
People thought of JFK, for reasons I will never understand, as representing the working class, that is, the subway riders. And he had actually had real heroic military service, so thus he was very popular.
Military service would be a bad thing for any Dem candidate nowadays, even though they want to send our children off to endless wars.
So you have to put all of this in its historic context.