Some time ago, I wrote that I might start manifesting my anxiety of the upcoming presidential election by writing about weird presidential facts. Here’s yet another example of my anxiety manifesting.
Between 1788 and 2020, there have been (if my math is correct), 59 presidential elections. Most of them have been uncontroversial affairs. George Washington ran unopposed. James Monroe was virtually unopposed. The only reason why even one elector voted against him in 1820 was to keep the honor of being unanimously elected exclusive to George Washington.
Some elections were wipeouts, like Richard Nixon defeating George McGovern or Lyndon Johnson defeating Barry Goldwater or Franklin Roosevelt defeating Alf Landon or Ronald Reagan defeating Walter Mondale.
Some elections were surprises. Here we have Harry Truman defeating Thomas Dewey and Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton.
In most presidential elections, the winner was unambiguous. However flawed the process, there was an election, the electors voted, and the results were accepted.
Notice that I said most. In a few elections, there has been some serious chicanery. I’ve identified six elections in which tomfoolery or suspected tomfoolery took place. I’ve split them up into three categories.
Cheated and won the presidency
Rutherford Hayes
Let’s start with the worst example. Let’s talk about the case where it’s pretty clear that cheating worked. That is, a candidate lost the popular vote, lost the electoral vote, and still ended up president. Thankfully, there is only one case thus far.
I’ve talked about the 1876 election before. The Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden was running against the Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes. At the end of election night, Tilden led the popular vote by 3%. He’d won 184 electoral votes to Hayes’ 165. He was one electoral vote short.
There were four states (Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon) outstanding that amounted to 20 electoral votes. Now, to be fair, there was voter intimidation in the Southern states by the Democratic party, so it’s not like their hands were clean . Be that as it may, Florida and Louisiana clearly had chosen Tilden. Their electoral votes normally would go to him, thus winning him the presidency.
A commission was established to figure out who should get which votes. Tilden only needed one vote to win. Out of that commission came the Compromise of 1877. The Republicans offered to remove the last federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction and leaving Black Americans to their inevitable tragic fate. In return, the Democratic members agreed not to challenge Hayes’ election. As a result, all 20 of the outstanding electoral votes went to Hayes, winning the presidency by a vote of 185 to 184.
Pretty suspicious but probably did not cheat
George W Bush
For those of a certain age, we remember the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W Bush. Gore clearly won the national popular vote. On election night, it all came down to Florida. Early in the night, it looked like it was going Bush’s way. Gore called Bush to concede. Later, votes started to break towards Gore. Gore called Bush back to unconcede.
And then chaos.
There were multiple recounts. There were controversies of how to count ballots with hanging chads. There were poorly designed butterfly ballots that resulted in some ten thousand votes for the arch-conservative Pat Buchanan in a reliably Democratic county. There were tens of thousands of Black voters thrown off voter rolls due to the actions of the Florida Secretary of State, who just coincidentally was Bush’s campaign chair in Florida. Let’s not forget the hilariously named Brooks Brothers Riot, where over dressed and well groomed Republican partisans tried to bum rush election offices to shut down the count.
Finally, the Supreme Court stepped in, and in a blatant party vote, shut down the last recount while it was still ongoing.
Thus, out of six million votes cast in Florida, George W Bush won by a total of 537 votes.
Was there chicanery? In the days and months before the election, most definitely. The actual vote counting seemed to be a sincere effort.
The bottom line, at least from my point of view, is that Florida was truly a coin toss. If you counted Florida votes 100 times, Bush might have won 51 and Gore 49.
John F Kennedy
This one is a little older. The 1960 election pitting Kennedy against Richard Nixon was a nail biter. In the popular vote, Kennedy eked out the vote over Nixon by 100,000 votes out of 68 million total votes (a scant .2% margin of victory).
Kennedy had about the same margin in Illinois. However, Cook County was rather infamously run by Mayor Richard Daley. It was believed that, through connivances between Daley and Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, the voter rolls were inflated and that they put the fix in for Kennedy.
Although this a great conspiracy theory tying a political machine to the mafia, the fact is that it’s not as if Cook County was that much of a statistical outlier for Kennedy. Not only that, but even if Kennedy had lost Illinois, he would have still had enough votes in the electoral college to get elected president.
John Quincy Adams
If you’re a history geek, this is a famous one. With four presidential candidates running, no one won a majority in the electoral college, so the election was sent to the House of Representatives.
Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and led in the electoral college, so he naturally assumed that he would prevail in the House.
However, Henry Clay, the House Speaker, had other ideas. He threw his support over to Adams, which was enough for Adams to win the majority of the states and get elected.
He promptly named Clay to be Secretary of State. It’s not considered such now, but back in those days, Secretary of State was seen as the stepping stone to the presidency (Madison was Jefferson’s, Monroe was Madison’s).
Jackson assumed that there was some wink-wink deal between Adams and Clay. Adams would support Clay at the end of his presidency. This led to the infamous accusation of a ‘Corrupt Bargain’.
I don’t know the truth here, but Adams, being an Adams, was kind of a stiff, prissy fussbudget that I don’t see lowering himself to make such a deal with Clay. I think that Clay legitimately thought that Jackson, being Jackson, was an ignorant hothead not qualified to be president. Clay was one of the most successful and popular statemen of his day, so his appointment as Secretary of State seems legitimate.
If anything, this whole episode just shows how bad the Adams political family was when it comes to the optics of practical politics.
Cheated but failed to win the presidency
Donald Trump
You probably knew that I was going to lead this section with Trump. In fact, even now, there are tens of millions of Americans who think that Biden should fall into the cheated and won the presidency category above. Considering the fact that this was most heavily supervised election in history, that over 60 lawsuits were filed to no effect (my favorite moment in that fiasco is still Rudy Giuliani telling a judge that they have a lot of theories but not a lot of facts), and that multiple recounts in Arizona only increased the victory margin in that state for Biden, that claim is, frankly, delusional. Biden won decisively both in the popular vote and in the electoral college.
That did not stop Trump from trying to steal the election. Everything from having protesters chanting to ‘stop the count’ in states where he was leading and ‘count the votes’ in states where he was trailing to a highly suspicious call to the Georgia Secretary of State asking him to ‘find some votes’ to having false electors illegally send in their votes to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to, I’m not sure, maybe set fire to ballots he didn’t like to telling insurrectionists to ‘fight like Hell’ and march on to the Capitol building to stop the vote counting, Trump did not leave any stone unturned in his attempts to steal the election.
It was all for naught and it sure does look like, here we go again.
Henry Clay
These last two, probably because of the passage of time, seemed pretty amusing to me.
Henry Clay had a plan. The election of 1824 was going to be madness. Yes, I’m going to talk about 1824 again. Although there was still only one political party in the US (Democratic Republican), there was not one, not two, not three, but four candidates from the Democratic Republican party running to be president. The candidates were John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford.
Clay knew that he wasn’t going to win the popular vote. Playing chess while everyone was playing checkers, he knew that, with four candidates running, that the odds were pretty low that one of the four would end up with a majority of the electoral vote.
In that case, the House of Representatives decide. Each state gets one vote and whoever gets the majority of the votes becomes president. I’ll give you one guess who was the Speaker of the House. Yep, it was Henry Clay.
He counted on the vote going to the House and then using his position as Speaker to get enough votes to get himself elected president.
There was only one flaw in the plan. Only the top three vote totals in the electoral college move on to the House. You guessed it. Clay finished in fourth, a scat four votes behind Crawford.
Let the corrupt bargain commence!
Aaron Burr
If anything, this one is even funnier than Clay’s grand plan falling apart by four electoral votes.
The 1800 election was really the first true election led by parties. The incumbent John Adams was running as the Federalist candidate. Thomas Jefferson was the Democratic Republican candidate. With the growth of parties, there now was the concept of a running mate. For Jefferson, Aaron Burr was tapped to run as his vice president.
Jefferson unquestionably beat Adams, winning 73 electoral votes to 65. In the original electoral college system, each member of the electoral college had two votes. The top two vote getters then became president and vice president. One Democratic Republican elector was supposed to cast one of their ballots for a third party or to abstain. Whoever was supposed to do this either did not get the memo or panicked. Regardless, at the end of the count, both Jefferson and Burr had 73 electoral votes. Since there was no separate president / vice president vote, it was a tie. The vote got thrown to the House.
Everyone knew that Jefferson was supposed to be on top of the ticket. There were two factors in play. One was that it was a Federalist dominated outgoing House that was going to make the decision and Federalists hated Jefferson. The other was Aaron Burr. Although Burr, along with everyone else, knew that he was supposed to be vice president, he was a morally suspect slippery politician that thought that he might have just found a back door path to the presidency. He didn’t outright campaign for it, but his silence was notable.
After 36 ballots, the House finally did the right thing and gave Jefferson the presidency. Interesting, it was Burr’s bitter rival, Federalist Alexander Hamilton, that convinced enough of his fellow Federalists to select Jefferson that put Jefferson over the top. Some three years later, their rivalry became deadly when Burr fatally shot Hamilton in a duel.
Let’s all cross our fingers that I won’t have to add the 2024 presidential election to this list!
dorkenstein 