"Sorry, but that's not a "fact":"
Maybe...lots of opinions...Francis Russel writes in the New York Review of Books:
"Given the Byzantine intricacies of Alabama politics, it is indeed possible that Nixon's popular vote may have slightly exceeded Kennedy's in that close election. Whereas in most states in a presidential election voters are given a single slate of Republican or Democratic electors to check off, Alabama Democratic voters could choose or reject individually from the list of electors, eleven separate choices. There must have been considerable vote-splitting in 1960, for an anti-Kennedy elector topped the list with 324,050 votes, trailed by a pro-Kennedy with 318,303 votes. This latter figure the Congressional Quarterly gives as the total Alabama Kennedy vote. The difference between the "anti" and the "pro," the Quarterly tabulates as "Other." The "Others" then, with some six thousand votes, take six electors whereas the Republicans with thirty times that total get no electors at all. This, as Professor Tullock points out, is an absurdity.
There is no tabulating the vote exactly, but for a reasonable approximation one can divide 318,303 by eleven, multiply it by five for the pro-Kennedys and by six for the anti-Kennedys. The Kennedy Alabama total would then be 144,685 instead of the Quarterly's given 318,303. If we then deduct the 179,838 anti-Kennedy Alabama votes from the national total then Nixon did have a final 64,165 vote plurality in the 68,828,960 votes cast.
And John Fund wrote in 2003...
"The Democratic slate defeated Nixon, 324,050 votes to 237,981. In the end, the six unpledged electors voted for Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, a leading Dixiecrat, and the other five stuck with their pledge to Kennedy. When the Associated Press at the time counted up the popular vote from all 50 states it listed all the Democratic votes, pledged and unpledged, in the Kennedy column. Over the years other counts have routinely assigned all of Alabama's votes to Kennedy.
But scholars say that isn't accurate. "Not all the voters who chose those electors were for Kennedy--anything but," says historian Albert Southwick. Humphrey Taylor, the current chairman of the polling firm Louis Harris & Associates (which worked for Kennedy in 1960), acknowledges that in Alabama "much of the popular vote . . . that is credited to Kennedy's line to give him a small plurality nationally" is dubious. "Richard Nixon seems to have carried the popular vote narrowly, while Kennedy won in the Electoral College," he concludes.
Congressional Quarterly, the respected nonpartisan chronicler of Washington politics, spent some effort in the 1960s to come up with a fair way of counting Alabama's votes. Reporter Neil Pierce took the highest vote cast for any of the 11 Democratic electors in Alabama--324,050--and divided it proportionately between Kennedy and the unpledged electors who ended up voting for Harry Byrd.
Using that method, Kennedy was given credit for 5/11ths of the Democratic total, or 147,295 votes. Nixon's total in Alabama of 237,981 remained the same. The remaining 176,755 votes were counted as being for the unpledged electors.
With these new totals for Alabama factored in with the vote counts for the other 49 states, Nixon has a 58,181-vote plurality, edging out Kennedy 34,108,157 votes to 34,049,976. Using that calculation the 1960 election was even closer than we thought."
