1800 United States presidential election: Difference between revisions

During President [[Donald Trump]]'s attempts to [[Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election|overturn his defeat]] in thecontroversial [[2020 United States presidential election]], Jefferson's action to count Georgia's votes was cited as precedent by Trumpallies of alliesPresident Donald Trump such as Congressman [[Louie Gohmert]], White House personnel director [[Johnny McEntee]], and attorney [[John C. Eastman]]. Eastman wrote a [[Eastman memorandums|series of memoranda]] outlining a theory whereby the Vice President has the power to unilaterally overturn the results of a presidential election.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/01/05/no-thomas-jefferson-didnt-rig-the-1800-vote-count/|title = No, Thomas Jefferson Didn't Rig the 1800 Vote Count| newspaper=Washington Monthly |date = January 5, 2021| last1=Brewer | first1=Holly }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-johnny-mcentee-january-6-betrayal/620646/ |access-date=November 21, 2021 |title=The Man Who Made January 6 Possible|first=Jonathan D.|last=Karl|date=November 9, 2021|website=The Atlantic}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last1=Cathey |first1=Libby |title=Memo from Trump attorney outlined how Pence could overturn election, says new book |url=https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/memo-trump-attorney-outlined-pence-overturn-election-book/story?id=81134003 |access-date=November 21, 2021 |work=[[ABC News]] |date=November 14, 2021}}</ref>

Of the 16 states that took part in the 1800 election, six (Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia) used some kind of popular vote. In Rhode Island and Virginia, voters elected their state's entire Electoral College delegation at large; Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee all used some variation of single-member districts. In the rest, electors were chosen by the state legislature. Not until the 1836 presidential election would all states have direct popular selection of electors (excepting South Carolina which had its state legislature vote for electors until 1868). Popular vote records for several states are incomplete, and the returns from Kentucky and Tennessee appear to have been lost; states did not print or issue electoral ballots in this time and most were issued by newspapers which supported a particular party or candidate. Newspapers are also the main source of voting records in the early 19th century, and frontier states such as Tennessee had few of them operating, without any known surviving examples. Below are the surviving popular vote figures as published in ''A New Nation Votes.''.