Before plane trains and automobiles? Before TV and radio? Did the said parties go town to town giving speeches? Then the town votes? How long would an annoucement take? How were the votes counted
Answering only in part (and I have a feeling I’ll forget something important)…
First off, major candidates did not start campaigning until near the end of the nineteenth century (William Jennings Bryan in 1896 being of early note). Proxies were sent to campaign across the country, and local campaigning in the form of rallies and bonfires was of importance in this period, as well as the production of campaign literature.
Before then, there were newspapers and telegraphs.
Before 1812, few states had a popular vote. The presidential electors (i.e., the members of the Electoral College) were chosen by the state legislatures.
Since 1845 the presidential election has always been held nationwide on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, since 1789 all presidential electors have had to meet on the same day, nationwide, in a designated place to cast their votes. By Act of Congress, the presidential electors cast their votes on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December.
The votes were counted by hand. Probably the longest it has taken for a presidential election to be determined was the first. George Washington was elected unanimously by the Electoral College in February 1789, but the results were not known until April 6, when the U.S. Senate finally had quorum to count the electoral votes (bad weather in the early months of 1789 made travel difficult).
Washington’s term had already begun on March 4, 1789, but he did not learn of his election until April 14. He left his home in Virginia two days later, for his tardy inauguration in New York City on April 30.
Popular vote totals generally weren’t tabulated in any official way until 1824, and not all the states had popular votes to choose their electors. Andrew Jackson had the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, but not a majority of either, and John Quincy Adams won the election in the House.
Some other contested elections took a while to be decided and made the delays in 2000 seem brief.
The election of 1800 wasn’t decided by the House until February 17, 1801.
The election of 1876 was decided around a similar time, but in February of 1877 (I can’t find the exact date right now.)
Electoral votes are still counted by hand. And they are written out by hand. In 2004, one Minnesota elector voted for John Edwards for president and vice-president.
I believe South Carolina was the last state to switch from appointing electors to choosing them by popular vote. They held out until the state was reconstructed after the Civil War.
Not quite. Until ?? (but certainly through the 50s) Maine voted 6 weeks before everyone else. There was even a saying (not very predictive), “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” (In 1936 every state except Maine and Vermont supported Roosevelt.) The explanation was by November, there was too much snow to allow most Mainelanders to vote.
Through the first half of the 20th century, candidates mostly ran “whistlestop” campaigns where they would rent a rail car (or maybe a whole train) and go across the country from place to place stopping in every town on their route and give a speech from a small platform on the end of the train. I think the last whistlestop campaign was Truman’s in 1948. That was also the last campaign conducted largely without TV, since only a small percentage of people owned a TV by 1948, while nearly everyone (in cities at least; rural areas had terrible reception and cable hadn’t started) did by 1952.
In 1948, 0.8% of U.S. households had television. By 1952, 34.2 percent of U.S. households had television.
I’ve been several times to the home of Warren G. Harding, who was elected in 1920 – the first year that women voted. He lived in Marion, Ohio, and conducted his campaign from the front porch of his home. Thousands of people went to Marion – mainly by train, since it had a train service back then – to hear him speak. So (at least in this case), the candidate didn’t go out to the voters: the voters came to the candidate.
Maine conducted state and Congressional elections only, in September. The law requiring presidential electors to be chosen in November applied to Maine as well as every other state.
Votes were counted by hand, of course, until the invention of voting machines. It didn’t take all that long. Each town or county would tabulate its votes (typically a few hundred) and then (after the 1840’s) telegraph the results to the state capital, to the news media, and to party officials.
Other posters have cited close and disputed elections, which of course took a long time to resolve, then and now, but for an ordinary election, the telegraph could spread results about as quickly as television. Abraham Lincoln spent Election Night of 1860 in the Springfield telegraph office and knew that he had been elected by reasonably early in the evening.
That was a mistake, recorded by political partisanship. He got confused as to which ballot was for which office, and wrote down Edwards. He saw the mistake, and wanted to correct it, but the Secretary of State (a Republican, who wanted to reduce the votes for Kerry) said that it could not be corrected. So it was recorded as a vote for Edwards, not Kerry.
Opinion presented as fact. If the Secretary of State had been a Democrat, would it be assumed ipso facto that he or she would be willing to do whatever was necessary to reduce votes for Bush?
Repsonse deleted – didn’t notice that this was GQ, not GD.
It should be added that the presidential electors in Minnesota vote on unsigned ballots. Even if an elector later stepped forward after the ballots were counted to say that he or she had voted in error, there would be no way to verify that that ballot was submitted by that elector. More importantly, none of the Minnesota electors came forward to claim such an error before the election results were certified to Congress.