Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, January 30th, 1964, the state of Illinois tries something new.

As you probably know, when you go vote in an election, you are almost always electing someone to represent your district.

Congress works this way.

City councils work this way.

State legislatures work this way.

The idea, of course, is that your representative should be representing a smaller community, your local community's interests.

But in 1964, Illinois decided to mix it up.

For their state legislature elections, they decided to make every single seat at large.

Every representative would be voted on by all of the people of Illinois, no matter where they lived.

That sounds nice and democratic, a laudable example maybe of trying something new. I'm always up for trying something new when it comes towards democracy.

Until you realize that we're talking about every voter having to weigh in on the selection of 177 state legislators. So I hope the people of Illinois brought a snack into the

voting booth because they were going to be there for a long, long time. Let's talk about this very weird at-large experiment

here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello, Jody. Hey there. I get shivers just thinking about going in and seeing that ballot.

Well, you lost me at 177 names, but you'll win me back with the snacks. So now I'm back on board.

This is crazy because it's not even a ballot. This is a booklet. You know what I mean? This is like,

you're getting like the phone book and just selecting names. It's wild.

We'll talk about how we ended up at this moment, but the New York Times article about it at the time says,

what is as big as a bath towel and orange in color? It's the large ballot for the election

of the Illinois House of Representatives. But it really was, apparently, as big as a bath towel,

...