The disputed electoral vote results of the 2000 presidential election have prompted a reexamination of the controversial resolution of the 1876 presidential election. Roy Morris Jr. bluntly communicates his thesis about the 1876 presidential election in the title of his 2003 book, Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876. Even former chief justice William Rehnquist wrote a book about the 1876 presidential election, apparently for the purpose of justifying the Supreme Court's role in deciding the 2000 presidential election. Unlike the 2000 presidential election, however, the 1876 presidential election was ultimately decided by a federal electoral commission whose fifteen members consisted of equal numbers of U.S. representatives, senators, and Supreme Court justices.

Historian Michael F. Holt persuasively claims that there are other reasons to reevaluate the presidential election of 1876 from other perspectives and contexts in his book, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. As Holt notes, previous, conventional summaries and analyses of the 1876 presidential election emphasize a link between its outcome in favor of Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes and its domestic policy consequences, especially the complete end of Reconstruction in the South in 1877. Holt challenges C. Vann Woodward's claim that the election of Hayes was the “Compromise of 1877” in which Southern Democrats colluded with Republicans to make Hayes president in exchange for the withdrawal of all remaining occupying troops in the South, especially for the purpose of removing federal protection of voting rights for usually Republican African Americans in the South. Holt provides impressive archival evidence that refutes the Woodward thesis. In particular, he indicates that “by the last week of February, some of the northern Democrats who had been the most militant in December, including Speaker Randall, now conceded Hayes's election” while southern Democrats were more likely to oppose this concession (240). Holt also reveals that Grant had already greatly reduced federal military intervention in the South and that whoever succeeded Grant as president would have probably completed this military withdrawal.

Moreover, Holt contends that the election of Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes instead of Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden as president probably made little or no difference regarding policy consequences from 1877 to 1881 on other major issues, such as civil service reform, specie resumption, the Catholic school question, and the use of federal troops to end a railroad strike in 1877. Instead, Holt emphasizes that the significance of the 1876 presidential election should be examined within the context of growing conflicts and weaknesses within the Republican Party following the 1872 presidential election and the growth of Democratic voting strength in presidential and Congressional elections, both nationally and within the South. Consequently, the Democrats won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874 and maintained a reduced majority in the House as a result of the 1876 elections. This national Democratic electoral trend and the unusually high rate of voter turnout in the 1876 presidential election, especially among Southern whites, helped Tilden to win approximately 264,000 more popular votes than Hayes.

The Republican Party was also plagued by the defection of the liberal Republicans, later nicknamed mugwumps, who especially criticized the Republican administration of Ulysses S. Grant for corruption, excessive taxing and spending, the bank panic of 1873, and patronage abuses. Indeed, Samuel J. Tilden's “reputation as a political reformer and a hard-money man made him the Democrat most likely to get the backing of Liberal Republicans” (100). These political events, issues, and forces favoring the Democratic Party “brought Democrats and Republicans to a competitive equilibrium that had not existed since the 1850s and would continue until the 1890s” (248).

After the states submitted their electoral votes to Congress, the initial count was 184 votes for Tilden, 165 votes for Hayes, and twenty disputed votes. With 185 electoral votes needed to win the 1876 presidential election, the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives created the Federal Electoral Commission to resolve these electoral votes and, ultimately, determine the winner of the presidential election. Partisan composition of the fifteen-member commission consisted of seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent with five members each from the House, Senate, and Supreme Court. The independent was Supreme Court justice David Davis, who resigned from the Federal Electoral Commission after the Illinois state legislature elected him to the Senate. The other Supreme Court justices on the commission subsequently chose Justice Joseph Bradley, a Republican, to replace Davis on the commission. The Republicans now had an eight-to-seven majority on the Federal Electoral Commission.

Deliberating from January 31 until March 2, 1877, the Federal Electoral Commission focused its efforts on the nineteen disputed electoral votes from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida and one disputed electoral vote from Oregon. Voting entirely along partisan lines, the Federal Electoral Commission voted eight to seven that all of these twenty disputed electoral votes be granted to Hayes who was subsequently declared the winner with 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184. Three days later, on March 5, 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated as president. In his inaugural address, Hayes solemnly stated that “we have reached the close of a political contest marked by the excitement which usually attends the contests between great political parties whose members espouse and advocate with earnest faith their respective creeds. The circumstances were, perhaps, in no respect extraordinary save in the closeness and consequent uncertainty of the result” (263).

Like other famous, disputed presidential elections, such as those of 1800 and 1960, the presidential election of 1876 will continue to attract scholarly research and different theses from historians and political scientists. Nonetheless, Holt's book will endure as a significant scholarly contribution to this topic. It merits the attention of anyone interested in learning more about the development and persistence of an equally competitive, two-party equilibrium from 1876 until the Republican realignment of 1896.