amuel J. Tilden was a soft-spoken man. Before becoming governor of New York, he prosecuted Tammany Hall corruption. In 1876 he ran for president and won a quarter-million votes more than his opponent. His opponent became president thanks to the Electoral College.
The Electoral College does not appear in the Constitution. It seldom ''elects'' presidents, nor is it ''collegial,'' as its creators hoped. The Electoral College is not democratic, either. It's like the institution it is based upon, the US Senate, where Vermont gets the same two bonus votes that New York does, and Wyoming is proportionately more powerful than California.
Three times the Electoral College has overruled the popular vote. Once the beneficiary was the son of a former president. Another time the loser-winner was the grandson of a former president. In 2000, George W. Bush could rack up big wins in Western and Southern states, but if Al Gore carries some big states by a slim margin, he could become president. The notion is that Gore starts from the Dukakis base, or what's left of it in the Northeast, then wins Florida and other close states to edge over 270 electoral votes.
The scenario is far-fetched, but it is more likely that the next president will be the 17th ''minority'' president, joining those who won with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Abraham Lincoln got less than 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon got less than half. Ditto for Woodrow Wilson, twice, and Bill Clinton, twice. Mandate? Shmandate.
If Bush wins the popular vote and Gore becomes president, would this be a ''constitutional crisis?'' Only among hysterical media. The last popular-vote winner who lost was Grover Cleveland, running for reelection in 1888. He outpolled his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, by more than 90,000 votes. But Harrison won 233 electoral votes to Cleveland's 168.
Cleveland congratulated the winner and attended Harrison's inaugural, where the weather was wretched, stirring fears of ''Harrison's curse.'' In 1841, the new president's grandfather, William Henry Harrison, gave an hourlong inaugural speech, bareheaded in the cold rain. A month later he was dead. In 1889, according to one account, ''while the oath was being administered, Mr. Cleveland good-naturedly held his umbrella over the bared head of his successor.'' That's the way presidential politics should work.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, with 41 percent to 31 percent for John Quincy Adams, son of a former president. In the House, the third-place finisher, Henry Clay, threw his support to Adams, who later named Clay secretary of state. This ''corrupt bargain'' became an issue in the 1828 election, which Jackson won easily.
Political party conventions began in the 1830s, and two-party politics has dominated ever since. The Electoral College was not tested again until 1876, when Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York and the Democratic nominee, won 51 percent but lost the election to Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, who won 48 percent.
Early in 1877, a 15-man commission counted votes from disputed Southern states as ''Rutherfraud'' Hayes, as he came to be known, made a deal with leaders of the late Confederacy in Congress. He would remove federal troops from defeated Dixie and end Reconstruction policies if Southerners would grant slaves and other blacks full civil rights. The latter promise was infamously broken, but Hayes won in the Electoral College, 185-184. The defeated Tilden took the news with a statesmanlike calm that Bush or Gore could patriotically emulate.
''I can return to private life,'' Tilden said, ''with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office.''
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
