JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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This is another possibility that the President coudl tie this stuff up for so long that the swing states fail to officially name a winner and it then goes to the House for a decision, and this happ3ened in 1876
The U.S. Presidential Election of 1876 Was Pure Chaos. Could 2020 Be the Same?
"The 1876 election results are still debated by historians. Tilden had won 184 of 185 needed electoral votes and also led the popular vote by more than 250,000. Four states -- Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, South Carolina -- claimed victory on both sides of the aisle, forcing Congress to dictate...
nationalinterest.org
The 1876 presidential election—one of the most controversial elections that made Americans question the validity of the Electoral College voting system—granted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after a polarized Congress disputed votes from four key states, marking the closest victory in history, as Hayes beat his Democratic competitor by just one vote.....
Amid the 1876 presidential election, the United States was in a blistered economic depression—which came to be the panic of 1873. Republican Ulysses S. Grant was the president at the time, so Democrats viewed the election as being advantageous since the economy was in complete ruins. The party nominated bourbon Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, the former governor of New York, to regain the White House.
The Republicans supported Hayes, the former governor of Ohio and Civil War hero, who also was known to be a reformer. Both candidates didn’t campaign much partially due to the country’s economic state.
With the Democrat power in the House and the Republicans dominating the Senate—similar to 2020—Congress established a bipartisan electoral commission composed of seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one Independent. But, the Independent—Supreme Court Justice David Davis—dropped out of the commission after he was offered a Senate seat. A Republican then replaced him, and the commission voted along strict party lines in favor of Hayes getting the electoral votes.
In an 8-7 ruling, Hayes beat Tilden by one electoral college vote, marking it one of the few presidential elections that the president elected did not lead by popular vote.