2000 Vote: A Footnote in the History Books?

The words that Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary on Oct. 22, 1876, proved oddly prophetic: “Another danger is imminent--a contested result.”

Exactly two weeks later, the Republican presidential candidate lost the popular vote to his Democratic rival, Samuel J. Tilden.

But Hayes won the electoral college vote--and eventually the presidency--in a controversial election that ultimately was decided by a special congressional commission.

A dozen years later, the scenario unfolded a second time, when Benjamin Harrison, the Republican candidate, lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote and the White House, edging out Democrat Grover Cleveland.

With history quite possibly repeating itself this week in a remarkable drama focusing on a single state, “I think we’ve learned quite overwhelmingly from the past that the Republic will go on and that people do unite behind a president,” whoever he turns out to be, said American University history professor Allan Lichtman. “While the lack of a popular mandate is a handicap, it’s not an insurmountable one.”

The electoral college system was designed by the framers of the Constitution as a compromise between those who wanted the direct election of the president by the people and those who wanted Congress to make the selection.

Different Dynamics Are at Work Today

But the environment of the 21st century is a markedly different one from that of the 18th and 19th centuries, with different issues and social and cultural dynamics at work, particularly the permeating influence of the mass media.

Today, “the media have created this entertainment culture where you have to create a horse race and drive it forward with polls,” Lichtman said. “In the past, there was some primitive forecasting, but, to get results, you had to wait for results.”

Today, “everyone in the country is involved and knowing what’s going on, and . . . expectations are different,” said Todd Donovan, political science professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash.

“You’re talking about another world” in 1876, said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “It had to do with the Civil War and Reconstruction and putting the country back together again. It [the election] was decided by a commission the likes of which we will never see again.”

Republican Hayes, three-time governor of Ohio, lost the popular vote and had a questionable lead in the electoral college vote. Tilden had captured 4.3 million popular votes to Hayes’ 4 million.

Vote counts in three states--Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana--were called into question because violence had accompanied the voting there. There was considerable bitterness between Northern and Southern interests, and the outcome became so controversial that some feared it would trigger a second Civil War.

Eventually, Congress settled the issue by appointing a special commission made up of five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices. They bargained for weeks before resolving the matter.

Like today, Florida was a key battleground. The validity of the state’s vote count for Hayes was challenged, but the commission declined to judge how the balloting had been conducted, accepting only the validity of the certificates presented to Congress.

That decision gave the state to Hayes. Challenges to vote counts in the other states were similarly dismissed, securing the presidency for Hayes.

In 1888, a president again was elected after losing the popular vote but winning in the electoral college. Incumbent Cleveland won 5.5 million popular votes to Harrison’s 5.4 million votes. But he had 169 electoral votes to Harrison’s 233.

But Cleveland remained popular with the public. Four years later, he beat Harrison handily in a presidential rematch.

Hess predicted that the events of the 2000 campaign probably will prompt “congressional hearings, talk radio, editorials, and I hope people who will be explaining the nature of federalism and the pluses and minuses of it.”

But unless the 2000 election also spurs a movement toward electoral reform, it will likely inspire only a footnote in the history books.

Should Republican candidate George W. Bush win, Donovan said, the tumultuous events of this week probably would become “an asterisk in the historical tables that says ‘lost the popular vote’ and nothing more.”