From: ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler)
Newsgroups: sci.math,alt.politics.elections
Subject: Re: Electoral college (was Re: Bill Clinton and Complex Analysis : -))
Date: 12 Nov 92 04:34:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: camelot.ARA.92Nov11233421
	<1992Nov7.222800.21778@ariel.ec.usf.edu>
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Greg McCOlm writes:  

>despite finishing second in the popular vote.
>

>Hayes was a special case.  Tilden (Democrat) actually won a 
>majority in the electoral college, but irregularities led 
>to the formation of a Commission (essentially, the Supreme 
>Court), to determine how the electoral votes should be 
>assigned.  The Commission consistently assigned all the 
>contested votes to Hayes, and a "secret" agreement was 
>made between the Democratic and Republican parties to have 
>Hayes's election accepted --- provided that the Reconstruction 
>ended.  And you thought Iran-Contra was bad ...
>

I have already commented at length on the election of Hayes vs. Tilden
in an earlier posting. I am reluctant to compose a new reply to Greg McColm,
except to say that his depiction of the events is quite inaccurate.

For the rest, I will quote from the relevant portion of my earlier posting:

Another remarkable feature of the constitution, from a logical point of
view, is that even though it is apparently inconsistent, it is nevertheless
incomplete. The evidence is the occurrence of constitutional crises in
which it is discovered that some result is not provable from the 
constitution. One remarkable example is the election of Hayes vs. Tilden
in 1876. We usually think of that election as the one where Hayes won
in the electoral college but lost in the popular vote, which is true and
interesting, but it is not the whole story. Three years earlier,
there had been a dispute in the state elections in Louisiana and,
I think, Arkansas and Florida. In Louisiana, two men both claimed to
be governor and one of them seized the gubernatorial mansion. There
were also two groups of people both claiming to be the legislature
and both were passing laws. The followers of each of the two "governors"
tried to arrest the other governor" for sedition and in order to 
avoid civil war in these states, Grant sent in troops to keep them
apart. Someone who was never elected, named Pinchback, wound up as
acting governor of Louisiana and Federal troops occupied these three
states for years. This affected the election of Hayes and Tilden in
the following way: during the presidential election, two groups of
people showed up in Washington both claiming to be the electors from
that state, this being a legacy of the unresolved dispute in the
state elections. The crisis was that THE CONSTITUTION MADE NO PROVISIONS
FOR HOW TO SETTLE DISPUTES IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. It says that
the vice president will read the votes, but it doesn't say the vice
president has the right to decide which are the votes.
It turned out that these three staes were exactly what Hayes needed
to win the election in the electoral college, and therefore the
entire election hinged on settling the issue of which group of
electors were the legitimate ones. Naturally, the Democrats had one
opinion as to who were the real electors and the Republicans had
the opposite opinion. Finally they worked out a deal where there
would be a carefully balanced committee of 15 that would decide.
At the last minute, the guy who was supposed to head the committee
dropped out to accept a judgeship somewhere and the deal fell apart.
The Democrats threatened to filibuster to prevent the votes from ever
being counted! Finally, the Republicans made a deal with the Southern
Democrats that the Southern Democrats would kill the filibuster and
let Hayes win the election and in exchange the Republicans would pull
the troops out of Louisiana, Arkansas and (I think) Florida and let
the governments there fall. My information for this comes from dim
recollections of a biography of Hayes and some articles I read in
the 19th century magazine The Independent, written while these events
were taking place. The Independent was published by the so-called
radical wing of the Republican party.


Allan Adler
ara@altdorf.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: sci.math