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Popular Vote
The popular vote—the vote of the people—was less prevalent in early American elections than it is today. Then, as now, the president and vice president were elected by the electoral college rather than by direct popular vote. State legislatures chose the electors in most cases, although in the first presidential election (1789) electors in four states were selected by popular vote. South Carolina was the last state to switch to popular vote in choosing electors, in 1868. Colorado, however, used legislative appointment in 1876, the year it became a state. (See direct election.)
The House of Representatives, as the “people's branch,” has always been elected by popular (direct) voting, but direct election of Senate members did not become universal until ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. Previously, most senators were sent to Washington by state legislatures as the Constitution specified, although as early as 1912 twenty-nine states had some type of direct election. Popular direct election of governors in some states predates the 1789 election because the states existed earlier under the Articles of Confederation. Thirteen of them became the original states under the Constitution when they ratified it, beginning with Delaware on December 7, 1787.
Wider Participation
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 people 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 CQ Press and updated with a series of new editions beginning in 1985, most recently in a sixth edition in 2010. The ICPSR, part of the Institute for Social Research, disseminates the in-depth voting studies of a newer institute affiliate, the national election studies.
There is no one “official” set of election results outside of those maintained in each state. But the increasing availability of election data on the Internet provides more comprehensive and greater access to voting information for researchers, students, political analysts and activists, and the general public than existed ever before.
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 popular election. Scholars' efforts to compile earlier returns have been thwarted by a lack of records.
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