It does seem to me misleading that, in tabulations of popular vote for 1860, zero votes are credited to Breckenridge as well as for Bell (and all to Douglas) even though 4 of the 7 were not pledged to Douglas. I suppose that is consistent with how the Alabama popular votes for the Democratic electors were all credited to Kennedy, even though only 5 of the 11 electors were pledged to Kennedy. I don't have a method to rectify this misleading situation, but it might be worthy of further discussion.
In his article "Popular Myths About Popular Vote–Electoral College Splits" (
PDF file), Brian J. Gaines suggests adding the votes for both the "loyal" and the "free" Democratic camps and then dividing both sums by 11 (the total number of EVs). This gives Kennedy 144,355 votes and unpledged Democrats 175,893 votes. This method actually makes Nixon the winner of the nationwide popular vote.
Gaines also discusses the convention of reporting a presidential candidates' total vote by giving the total won by the elector who received the most votes in stat where voters chose electors directly. He contends that this method is deceiving and instead proposes taking the average vote of each elector.
Additionally mysterious in 1860 is the Pennsylvania popular vote tally. Breckenridge is credited with 37.5% of the vote and Douglas with only 3.5%, a little more than Bell's 2.7%. I'm inferring that the statewide party chose to run a Breckenridge slate and a few counties distributed Douglas slates. If anyone has further insight on the Pennsylvania vote, please share it.
Michael Dubin's
United States Presidential Election, 1788-1860 offers this explanation:
"The Democratic Party [of Pennsylvania] chose its slate of electors before the National Convention. The electoral candidates agreed in advance to support the eventual nominee of the convention. However, the convention, meeting in Charleston, SC, adjourned without selecting a candidate, after several southern delegates left. A conventioned reassembled in Baltimore with more than a third of the delegates absent and nominated Douglas. Another conventioned assembled again in Charleston, with many of the delegates who left the original convention present, along with other delegates, and nominated Breckinridge. Both candidates' supporters claimed the right for their man to be considered the party candidate and the support of the electoral slate. Eventually, the state party worked out an agreement: if either candidate could win the national election with Pennsylvania's electoral vote, then all her electoral votes would go to that candidate. Of the 27 electoral candidates, 15 were Breckinridge supporters; the remaining 12 were for Douglas. This was often referred to as the Reading electoral slate, because it was in that city that the state party chose it. However, not all of the Douglas supporters agreed to this deal and established a separate Douglas only ticket. This slate comprised the 12 Douglas electoral candidates on the Reading ticket, and 15 additional Douglas supporters. This ticket was usually referred to as the Straight Douglas ticket. Thus 12 electoral candidates appeared on two tickets, Reading and Straight Douglas."
It was the Reading ticket which recieved 37.5% of the vote, and the Straight Douglas ticket which got 3.5%.
