Election 1876
The last time a US presidential race was as closely contested as Election 2000 was back in 1876 when the favorite, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, found himself unexpectedly locked in a dead-heat with his Republican challenger, three-time Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes.
That year there were bitter disputes over the electoral returns in South Carolina, Louisiana, Oregon and, yes, Florida. An electoral commission was formed (which was extra-constitutional), but behind the scenes, the party bosses came up with the "Bargain of 1877," which effectively awarded the White House to the Republicans but gave control of the South to the Democrats, which, as historian and Nation contributing editor Eric Foner recently pointed out in a letter to the New York Times, led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and with it the idea of federal responsibility for protecting the rights of black Americans.
As America's oldest weekly magazine, The Nation was there to cover this electoral saga and we've dug up some of our reporting from that period, which includes some bizarre echoes of today. Excerpts are available currently at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=history&s=1876elec
And, here in the year 2000, the country awaits the end of the legal wrangling that appears destined to determine the winner of this year's election.
But as Lani Guinier explains in the new issue of The Nation, the importance of the fiasco in Florida could go well beyond the outcome of this year's presidential race. Guinier, one of the country's foremost advocates of electoral reform, argues that what's happened in Florida provides a rare opportunity to rethink and improve US voting practices in order to make every vote genuinely count. As she writes, "this conversation has already begun, as several highly educated communities in Palm Beach experienced the same sense of systematic disfranchisement that beset the area's poorer and less-educated communities of color." Read this editorial in its entirety at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20001204&s=guinier
You can also find fresh post-election coverage by David Corn, Jonathan Schell, William Greider and Christopher Hitchens, from the most recent issue of The Nation, as well as the two Discussion Boards currently running, where you can register your views on Election 2000 and the role that Ralph Nader's candidacy played. All at:
Finally, please check out a 1996 report from our archives presciently examining problems with the electoral college. Attorney and voting rights expert Matthew Hoffman's "Electoral College Dropouts," decried the way that electors -"those shadowy figures whom our Constitution entrusts with the task of choosing the President"- are chosen, shows how this process is rigged against most African-American voters, and proposes a remedy.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=archive&s=19990617hoffman
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Best
Regards,
Peter
Rothberg
Associate
Publisher
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