POLITICAL NOTES: Final Count

In the 1956 presidential election, 62,025,576 Americans voted (an estimated 77.4% of the total eligible), breaking the previous record, set in 1952, by 473,658. Final official returns (except Rhode Island, where a handful of absentee ballots remained to be counted), computed last week, showed Republican Dwight Eisenhower with 35,575,420, giving him a plurality of 9,542,354 over Democrat Adlai Stevenson, whose total was 26,033,066. Ike’s margin of actual votes was the largest ever awarded a Republican candidate, but still ran second to Franklin Roosevelt’s 11,072,014-vote plurality over Republican Alf Landon in 1936.