won, by only 1 electoral vote... won, by only 1 electoral vote...The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876

Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes won the 1876 presidential election over Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York by a single electoral vote in one of the most disputed American presidential elections ever. Their contest produced the highest voter turnout in U.S. history.


Michael Holt talked about why this election was so close and what were the areas of dispute and compares the elections of 1876 and 2000

Program not embeddable :(
but this is the frame I would have liked to post 10:50 - 16:30

Florida (with 4 electoral votes), Louisiana (with 8), and South Carolina (with 7), reported returns favored Tilden, but election results in each state were marked by fraud and threats of violence against Republican voters.
One of the points of contention revolved around the design of ballots. At the time, parties would print ballots or "tickets" to enable voters to support them in the open ballots. To aid illiterate voters the parties would print symbols on the tickets. In this election, however, many Democratic ballots were printed with the Republican symbol, Abraham Lincoln, on them. The Republican-dominated state electoral commissions subsequently disallowed a sufficient number of Democratic votes to award their electoral votes to Hayes.


http://youtu.be/f6eBOsnoRJ4