THE ELECTION: What If?

The news from California made Republican hearts skip a beat. One week after election day, Vice President Dick Nixon moved into a steady 20,706-vote lead in his home state on the strength of the trickling count of absentee ballots. The switch of California's 32 electoral votes reduced Jack Kennedy's electoral count to 300, gave Nixon 223 of the 269 needed to win. Then Kennedy's lead in Minnesota (II) dropped on recheck to a shaky 22,011 (out of 1,537,844 votes cast). Since Kennedy's margins in such heavy-electoral-vote states as Illinois (27) and New Jersey (16) were less than 1%, Republicans were tantalized by the thought that a series of hard-nosed recounts could give Nixon the magic 269 after all.

The chances were something like hitting the daily double five days in a row, but the Republican high command began to wonder if they weren't worth a bet. Three days after election, G.O.P. National Chairman Thruston Morton had asked party leaders in eleven states to evaluate the narrow Democratic results and see whether expensive recounts (e.g., $50 a ballot box or voting machine in Pennsylvania) would be worthwhile. Most of the party leaders sent negative replies. But last week, after an emergency meeting of the National Committee in Washington, G.O.P. investigators moved into eight marginal states (Illinois, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) for a "close, hard look at the situation." Illinois Republicans, scanning a shaky 10,157 Kennedy lead—mostly in machine-run Democratic Cook County—had already ordered a re-count of more than 5,000 precincts. "If in Illinois and several other states Nixon receives a fair and accurate count," said Nixon's Illinois Lieutenant Bill Rentschler confidently, "then Nixon will be inaugurated in January."

Congenial Ticket? If the Republicans could dream, so could certain disgruntled Democrats who hope the South will rise again. In Montgomery, Ala., Lawyer R. Lea Harris ("just an interested citizen") called for a conference of Southern electors with Jack Kennedy to force Kennedy to agree to certain "requests" (e.g., restoration of states' rights). If Kennedy declined the invitation, said Harris, the 128 Southern electors should seek a coalition with Republican electors to name a more congenial ticket, composed of a Southern Democratic President (such as Georgia's Dick Russell) and a Republican Vice President (such as Henry Cabot Lodge or Barry Goldwater). Even though most of the Southern electors are pledged to vote for Kennedy, reasoned Harris, they are not bound to do so if their consciences forbid it.