[EL] Questions about the Electoral College and the Civil War

[Richard Winger]

For Abraham Lincoln to have received popular votes in those southern states, a group of Lincoln supporters would have needed to caucus, select presidential elector candidates for their own state, and print up ballots and distribute them.  Probably there were no individuals who wanted to become Lincoln presidential electors.  They might have feared for their own safety.
For the same reason, no Communist Party presidential candidate in South Carolina ever got any votes in the years when the Communist Party had presidential nominees, 1924-1940, even though South Carolina did not have government-printed ballots until 1950.  No one in South Carolina wanted to be publicly identified as a Communist presidential elector.
As to the confederate constitution, I don't think anyone believed that the electoral college in 1860 had caused Lincoln to win.  He would have won under any other system.  Lincoln got a majority of the popular vote, not just a plurality, in all the states he carried except California and Oregon.  California only had 4 electoral votes and Oregon only had 3.  The south just didn't have enough population to win that election, even given that in the south, only whites could vote.

Richard Winger 415-922-9779 PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147 

    On Monday, March 25, 2019, 2:49:35 PM PDT, Derek Muller <derek.muller at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Dear listserv members,
Recent discussions about the Electoral College caused me to revisit a couple of longstanding questions I've had about the Electoral College and events around the Civil War.
First, Abraham Lincoln received just 39.8% of the popular vote total (which assuredly would have been smaller if South Carolina had held a popular election rather than having its legislature choose electors). Lincoln received zero recorded votes in several southern states (just like John Fremont in 1856 and John Hale in 1852). But, of course, there weren't state-printed ballots. Voters brought their own tickets to the polls. So, was there literally not a single voter in these southern states who'd cast a ballot for a slate of Republican or Free Soil electors? (I suppose regionalism and a lack of party-building makes this possible.) Or did the state simply refuse to count any stray ballots cast for such candidates? I'm just interested in any historical research as to the total absence of votes for Lincoln in the South in 1860.
Second, the Confederate Constitution is mostly a light edit of the original Constitution with some pro-slavery additions and a few other changes. The President and Vice President would be elected to one six-year term, and term limited to that one term. But the Confederate Constitution preserved the Electoral College. Jefferson Davis won unanimously in the only election. But there were stray votes cast in the popular election held in North Carolina for other candidates other than Davis. So, is there evidence of why the Confederacy chose to preserve the Electoral College (which had just failed these states' interests in the election of a plurality-of-the-popular-vote candidate Lincoln)? Out of mere convenience and default? And what happened in North Carolina?
Sorry for a listserv-wide email, but I haven't seen details about these stories before, so I thought I'd ask here....
Best,

Derek

Derek T. Muller
Associate Professor of Law
Pepperdine University School of Law
24255 Pacific Coast Hwy
Malibu, CA 90263
+1 310-506-7058
SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/author=464341
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