User:MeekSaffron

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Hello Meek Saffron - in national nominating conventions, shifts sometimes occur at the end of a ballot. They most frequently occur on the final ballot, but I know of one case in which a shift occurred at the end of a ballot though no one had been nominated. I don't know how familiar you are with the mechanics of national nominating conventions - we have not had a second ballot in a major party convention since 1956 so most people have not heard of shifting votes.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. In the Republican National Convention of 1860, Abraham Lincoln led on the third presidential ballot with 231.5 votes, with 233 needed for nomination. Four delegates who had voted for Chase switched their vote to Lincoln, which gave him a majority. Now that he had won, other delegates shifted their votes to him as well. After all the delegates who wanted to switch their vote had done so, Lincoln ended up with 340 votes to 126 for all others. That means that there are two tallies for the third ballot: the vote before shifts (Lincoln 49.7%) and the vote after shifts (Lincoln 73%). Chronicler3 00:47, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Also I wanted to mention that in historic conventions, it is commonly the practice to declare the winner of the ballot nominated by acclamation. Historians usually do not recognize this as a shift of delegate votes, and in my research most accounts don't even mention it. Since the proceedings of most conventions are printed, though, the information appears there. Technically, this is a shifting of delegate votes also. Chronicler3 00:56, 5 November 2006 (UTC)