On This Election Day: April 29
April 27-29, 1802: Messiness over a middle name upends a U.S. House race
This is the second in a series of short posts I plan to publish every Tuesday. Each will take a quick look back at a U.S. election that occurred on the same date in the near or distant past. Also, dear reader, I will soon have a new piece dealing with contemporary politics, looking at taxes and the Republican Party!
What’s in a name? Well, in an 1802 election in New York to elect a member of the U.S. House of Representatives to the 8th Congress, a middle name mattered a great deal.
In the midterm elections during President Thomas Jefferson’s first term, New York held its congressional contests across the dates April 27-29, 1802.1 In New York’s 7th District, which encompassed what were then Greene and Ulster counties,2 a close race developed between Conrad Edmund Elmendorf, the Federalist candidate, and John Cantine, the Democratic-Republican.3
So what happened? If you search for the 7th District race on Tufts University’s A New Nation Votes database, it looks at first blush like Elmendorf narrowly won, 1,279 votes to 1,220 (51.0%-48.7%). However, things weren’t that simple because of Elmendorf’s middle name — or lack thereof on a few ballots. As it turned out, 123 votes for “Conrad Elmendorf” weren’t given to Elmendorf. As Tufts notes:
These mispelling votes (having omitted a middle name or initial) cost Elmendorf his election, which he contested. Rather than award him the seat, a new election was held in April 1803, in which Elmendorf was defeated.
Yes, that’s right. In the official tally, votes cast for Elmendorf that didn’t include his middle name or initial were tallied separately, handing Cantine victory. The final result instead was 48.7% for Cantine, 46.1% for Elmendorf (with middle), and 4.9% for Elmendorf (without middle), with a small number of scattered votes.
Was this above board? Perhaps not. Tufts cites at least one newspaper article from the time that claimed that foul actors in the town of Coxsackie influenced local election inspectors to count the ballots separately. Still, erroneous ballots were a real possibility back then: Parties, candidates, or other private actors would provide individual ballots to voters, and some states even used viva voce voting without ballots. State-printed ballots as we know them didn’t come about until the end of the 19th century.
The result clearly provoked controversy, regardless of how it came about. Cantine never took his seat in Congress, instead resigning before the 8th Congress began. Michael J. Dubin surmises that this may have been because Elmendorf would have formally contested the outcome before the House. (For what it’s worth, the House didn’t conduct a contested election case for this race.)
Cantine’s resignation precipitated a special election in the 7th District, which took place on April 26-28, 1803. Elmendorf ran again for the seat, but the Federalist candidate’s second attempt ended in an unambiguous defeat: He fell to Josiah Hasbrouck, the Democratic-Republican, 52.9%-46.9%.
Dates for elections used to vary quite a bit from state to state. Elections for the 8th Congress took place across 1802-03, ranging from from April 8, 1802 (Connecticut), to Oct. 3, 1803 (Maryland). The first session of the 8th Congress didn’t begin until Oct. 17, 1803. All election dates come from Michael Dubin’s incredible compendium, United States Congressional Elections, 1788-1997.
In 1809, Sullivan County was formed from the western part of Ulster County.
The party was commonly known as the Republicans back then, but is often denoted as the Democratic-Republicans or the Jeffersonian Republicans in historical accounts. It was Jefferson’s party and partly the precursor to what became today’s Democratic Party. It has no relationship to today’s Republican Party.