What now? The Constitution had a backup plan if no candidate won a majority of electoral votes, but there was no such process for resolving a dispute. The Republicans objected to the results from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, since both parties claimed their candidate had won the states. Hayes only won 165, but 20 more electoral votes were still in dispute. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, and when the votes were counted, Tilden won 184 electoral votes, exactly one vote shy of the majority needed at the time to win the presidency. The race was an ugly one between Republican Rutherford B. This time, though, the Constitution didn’t have an answer to the electoral crisis at hand. Similar to 1824, the election of 1876 wasn’t decided by the voters, but by Congress. Hayes served as the 19th President of the United States. WATCH: ' The Founding Fathers' on HISTORY Vault Rutherford B. “Was there ever witnessed such a bare faced corruption in any country before?” “he Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” said Jackson. Adams turned around and appointed Clay as his Secretary of State, infuriating Jackson, who accused his opponents of stealing the election in a corrupt bargain. The House voted to make Adams president, even though Jackson had beaten Adams by 99 electoral votes to 84. According to the 12th Amendment, the House can only vote on the top three vote-getters, which eliminated Clay from the running, but that didn’t stop Clay from allegedly wielding his influence as Speaker of the House. In cases where no presidential candidate wins a majority of electoral votes, the Constitution sends the vote to the House of Representatives. But to win the presidency, you need more than a plurality (the most electoral votes), you need a majority (more than half), and Jackson was 32 electoral votes shy of the mark. When the votes were tallied, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote and the Electoral College. This is the first of two occasions when the man ultimately elected president first lost both the popular vote and the electoral vote.īack in 1824, there were four contenders for the presidency, all members of the same Democratic-Republican party: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay. John Quincy Adams, 6th president of the United States. Take a look at all five times a president won the White House while losing the popular vote. But if their opponent wins a bunch of smaller states by tight margins, he or she could still win the Electoral College. For example, if one candidate wins by large percentages in a handful of very populous states, for example, they’ll probably win the popular vote. Since most states (48 plus Washington, D.C.) award all of their electoral votes to the person who wins the statewide popular vote, it’s mathematically possible to win more electoral votes while still losing the popular vote. California, a much more populous state, has 53 representatives in the House, but each of those congressmen and women represent more than 700,000 Californians. ![]() Wyoming, for example, has one House representative for all of its roughly 570,000 residents. This guaranteed minimum means that states with smaller populations end up having greater representation in the Electoral College per capita. Electors are apportioned according to the population of each state, but even the least populous states are constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of three electors (one representative and two senators). States are allotted electoral votes based on the number of representatives they have in the House plus their two senators. To win a modern presidential election, a candidate needs to capture 270 of the 538 total electoral votes. ![]() ![]() READ MORE: What Is the Electoral College and Why Was It Created? ![]() Instead, Article II, section I of the Constitution provides for the indirect election of the nation’s highest offices by a group of state-appointed “electors.” Collectively, this group is known as the Electoral College. president and vice president aren’t elected by direct popular vote. But in five incredibly close elections-including those for two of the past three presidents-the winner of the Electoral College was in fact the loser of the popular vote. Of the 58 presidential elections in the history of the United States, 53 of the winners took both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
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