The 2020 presidential election could become the most legally contested election in the nation’s history, but President Trump’s claims of voter fraud are the only thing that has made it controversial.

The election actually went smoothly, and a look back at history shows what real election controversies are all about. One of the most troubling elections came in 1876 when three states submitted the votes of two groups of electors.

Electors are those people who actually vote for president. Some delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787 didn’t want Congress to elect the president. Others thought voters lacked the resources to be fully informed.

The 55 delegates to the convention, after lengthy debate, decided on a compromise by which the states would each appoint independent electors. Today, political parties select the electors whom they expect to vote for their party’s presidential candidate. The voters pick the candidates they want, but it’s still the electoral votes that count.

In all but two states, the candidate who wins in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska each give two electoral votes to the statewide winner, and the other votes go to the candidates that win in the state’s House districts.

Every elector in every state voted for George Washington in 1778 as the first president. John Adams received the next largest number of electoral votes and became vice president.

The country saw the beginning of political parties early. Followers of Alexander Hamilton were known as Federalists. They believed in a strong federal government, its members were from the rich and “well-born” and they were pro-English. The followers of Thomas Jefferson were anti-Federalists at first, but they became Democratic-Republicans who had faith in the masses.

The first unusual election occurred in 1800 when Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each. Article II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution provided that when no one had a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives would select the president. Each state would have one vote. The candidate with the second highest number of votes would become vice president.

In 1800, it took 35 ballots to decide which of the two men to select. Hamilton thought Jefferson would make the better president, and he convinced 10 states to select him. Burr got the votes of only 4 states, but he became vice president. The 12th Amendment, adopted in 1804, provided that electors would vote for president and vice president separately.

No candidates in 1824 got a majority. Andrew Jackson had 99 electoral votes and John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, the second president, had 84. William Crawford had 41 and Henry Clay had 37. Jackson was 32 electoral votes away from winning.

Clay supported Adams, who won with 13 states on the first ballot in the House. Jackson got the votes of 7 states, and Crawford got the votes of four states. Jackson got his revenge in the 1828 election when he received 178 electoral votes to 83 for Adams.

Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican candidate in 1876, and Samuel J. Tilden was the Democratic candidate. Tilden received 184 electoral votes, 1 short of what he needed. Hayes received 165 electoral votes. However, 20 electoral votes were in dispute because of the double set of returns from three states.

Those returns were sent in by Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. There was no provision in the Constitution or any law of Congress to decide which set of returns was legal.

Republicans controlled the Senate, and they would have selected Hayes. Democrats controlled the House, and they would have selected Tilden. Congress found a way out of the dispute when it appointed a 15-member Electoral Commission to determine which set of returns to accept.

The commission eventually ended up with eight Republicans and seven Democrats. The Hayes electors were accepted by a vote of 8-7, and he was declared the president by a single vote two days before the inauguration. Tilden had polled a plurality of over a half million popular votes, and in that sense Hayes was considered a minority president.

The last controversial election came in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, which gave the election to Republican George W. Bush, who ended up with 271 electoral votes to 266 for Democrat Al Gore.

Candidates have lost the popular vote five times in U.S history (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) and still won the presidency.

Many Americans believe it’s time to end the electoral system in favor of a popular vote for president, but changing the system is extremely difficult. It would take a constitutional amendment that requires a twothirds supermajority in Congress plus ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Vote counts are still being challenged this year, but the 2020 electors will cast their votes in their states on Dec. 14, and Congress will count them on Jan. 6, 2021. If the legal issues are settled, the next president, expected to be Democrat Joe Biden, will take office Jan. 20.ELECTION CONTROVERSIES — The 2020 presidential election may be the most litigated in the nation’s history, but it definitely isn’t one of the more controversial elections. Five others hold that honor.

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