The Presidential Election of 1876 | Hacker News Reader

The Presidential Election of 1876

historytoday.com

46 pointssamclemens14 comments

I find stories like this (and also reading newspaper stories from elections in the Tammany Hall period) strangely reassuring.

Democracy can go terribly sometimes, but the real problems start when you try the alternatives.

followed shortly by the disastrous compromise of 1877. From which, i would argue, we have really yet to recover.

For context this was effectively the end of the post civil war reconstruction era.

> By 1905, nearly all black men were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every Southern state.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877

I was reading up on the box 13 scandal when lbj was elected to the senate in 1948 in highly suspicious circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

There is strong resistance to electoral reorganization and reform in the US (Gabbard's HR5147 Securing America’s Elections Act bill for example). One has to assume US political operatives insist on this wiggle room, which sometimes makes the US republic's democracy look very sketchy to other nations.

The relevant parts of that wiki article:

> 200 additional votes for Johnson were discovered, leading to his victory by 87 votes out of 1 million voters.

> Adams noticed that the last 200 ballots were different from the rest. The color of the ink and handwriting used on the tally sheet appeared to be identical, and they were in alphabetical order.

> Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, ruled that the federal government was not allowed to get involved with a state election. This ruling won Johnson the election

More recently, the 1960 election between JFK and Nixon was extremely close[1] and there were widespread accusations JFK stole the election. "It’s an interesting hypothetical: If no pall had been cast over the 1960 election, would Watergate have happened?"[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia... [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/10/was-nixon-robbed...

Ah, back when fraudulent voting existed in United States of America. Very interesting how much things have changed since.

Let's address the elephant in the room since tons of this style of HN posts are appearing all of a sudden: this is probably the most uncertain period of time in most of our lives. No matter who wins the election, it will be close and there will be a legal battle. Many people will be upset with the outcome.

Retreating into conspiracy theories is well known to be a coping mechanism for dealing with exactly these types of fears. Fixating on articles about election fraud in the US over the next couple of days is the same as diving into wikipedia about the materials science of steel beams after the 9/11 terrorist attacks because you want to believe that it was an inside job. I'm also seeing stuff pop up on here about Benford's law which is uncertain science at best [1].

The next few weeks will be a difficult time for our country and we need to be prepared to accept the results of the election without devolving into conspiracy theories. We should carefully consider whether our sudden "academic interest" in the history of fraud is real or has more to do with a wish to rationalize what we are seeing in the US today.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...

I've got to say, I came away from that with a very different feeling. A lot of my concern about the current election is about the state of democracy: whether we* can return to a civil process whose outcomes are accepted by all, or if we are doomed to increasingly partisan affairs won by any means necessary.

Reading about a similarly fraught election, which seems to have vanished almost entirely from modern discourse, is a comforting reminder that, while a return to the status quo may not be guaranteed, it has at least happened before.

* I should note I'm not American, but how American politics plays out has a strong effect on our own politics.

Isn't it amazing how we're suddenly being educated on this special case in American history. Trump and his goons want to use this as precedent to pull, essentially a coup. Precedent that goes right back to a time when racist slave masters were "losing value"... imagine that. How utterly depressing.

There is a wonderful apocryphal quote by Otto von Bismarck

"God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America."

The United States has been extremely lucky through her history. We somehow had the right leaders show up at the right time:

* George Washington not only lead the country to independence, but more importantly, he resigned after 8 years as President, when he could have easily been King for life.

* Abraham Lincoln who saw America through her darkest time when brother was literally killing brother on the field of battle. He kept the country together and also ended slavery.

* Franklin Roosevelt: Kept the country from being split apart by the Great Depression by pushing the New Deal and successfully led America through WWII

* Harry Truman: Ended WWII, and laid the foundation for 70 years of peace in Western Europe by establishing the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Europe and Japan, and instead of returning to isolation, committing the United States as the champion of the international order.

The United States has seen many dark days, and we have pulled through. I have confidence that we will pull through this current crisis as well.

You have these vaguely positive takes because their political coalitions were the victors who got to write the history. Understanding how things actually went horribly wrong under each of these leaders is much more important than whitewashing the past into a pleasing narrative.

Why not enlighten us?

Because we probably disagree on which were the things that went wrong, my point was just that with hindsight you can see how they did.

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