Popular Vote

As the right to vote was gradually extended to more and more people through state actions and constitutional amendments, the popular vote grew in significance for all elections. By 1972 virtually all law-abiding American citizens over age eighteen had the franchise. (See Black suffrage; Women's suffrage; Youth suffrage.)

How many actually exercised the franchise, however, was difficult to determine until the latter half of the twentieth century. Reliable popular vote returns for presidential and congressional elections before 1824 are not available; and many of those for later years did not come into existence until after 1962, when a small army of social scientists, supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation, began scouring the nation for old newspapers, state archives, historical society records, and anything else that could help reconstruct the vote tallies of early federal and state elections.

The result was the Historical Elections Returns File of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The historical file was the basis for the Guide to U.S. Elections, published in 1975 by Congressional Quarterly and updated with new editions in 1985, 1994, and 2001. The ICPSR, part of the Institute for Social Research, disseminates the in-depth voting studies of a newer institute affiliate, the National Election Studies.

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes popular vote returns for contemporary presidential elections, and it conducts voter turnout and other surveys of the electorate. Since the 1970s the Federal Election Commission has compiled presidential election results, although its figures sometimes disagree with the Census Bureau's. There is no one “official” set of election results outside of those maintained in each state.

Compilation of reliable popular vote returns for elections after 1824 became feasible because by then the two-party system was beginning to develop and more states were choosing presidential electors by [Page p350]popular election. Scholars' efforts to compile earlier returns have been thwarted by a lack of records.

As it happened, the 1824 election marked a historic milestone in the role of the popular vote in presidential elections. When none of the four major candidates, all from different factions of the Democratic-Republican Party, received a majority of the electoral vote, the election had to be decided by the House of Representatives for only the second time in history. Although Andrew Jackson led in the popular vote with 41.3 percent, the House elected John Quincy Adams, who had run second with 30.9 percent.

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