THIS IS the son of Saartje Gouverneur from Amsterdam. His name was Governor Morris and he was one of America’s Founding Fathers. He devised the system of electoral votes, so that a president does not necessarily need to get a majority of all votes cast by the voters, but simply at least 270 of those electoral votes, which are assigned state by state. His grandparents on his mother’s side came from Bergen op Zoom, Leiden and Amsterdam.
He lost half his leg in a traffic accident with a carriage. And then when he tried to puncture a blockage in his urinary bladder by inserting a long fishbone into his penis, he died of internal bleeding. Governor Morris lived to be 64. Too bad, because most voters in America have over time arrived at the conclusion that it would have been better if not he, but that odd system of electoral votes, had died an early death. Presidents have since 1876 won by minority vote four times: 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016.
