The United States Constitution takes great pains to explain how we are supposed to choose a President. It lays out a rather complex system in which each state designs its own voting protocol for electors who, in turn, are tasked with choosing among the candidates for President and Vice-President. When it works, it is a model of democracy in action. When it doesn't, it is a horror show. We have suffered the horror show twice in recent memory -- in 2000 and 2016.

The mother of all horror shows, however, came long before those, during the Presidential Election of 1876. The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote nationwide but came in one electoral vote short of winning the Presidency. The Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, lost the popular vote and was 20 electoral votes short of the goal. Twenty contested votes from four states hung in the balance.

Congress, tasked with the constitutional responsibility of counting the electoral votes, was at a loss for what to do. At last, it hit upon the solution that it often uses when it is in a jam -- it formed a commission. Fifteen prominent politicians and jurists, five each from the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court, were chosen to sit on it. Eight were Republicans and seven were Democrats.

How the Electoral Commission of 1877 managed to make Rutherford B. Hayes President, even though he had lost the election, in a 27-day marathon of hotly-contested hearings, attended by an army of lawyers for each side, is a tale of political wrangling that presaged the fights of the Presidential elections of the twenty-first century. The reader will learn how the American method of choosing its Head of State is fraught with trips and traps for unwary voters but nevertheless stands as the best that the world has yet managed to create.

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