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From a 1800 tie to a 537-vote recount: America's closest presidential election races

A look back at the closest elections in U.S. history, from tied electoral votes to a 537-vote Florida recount

A handful of ballots in one state has decided the American presidency more than once. The Electoral College converts state-level results into all-or-nothing blocks of votes, and nearly every state awards its entire slate to whoever finishes first, no matter how thin the margin. That design meant a 537-vote gap in Florida in 2000 carried the same weight as a landslide, and about 1,200 ballots in New York in 1884 put Grover Cleveland in the White House.

Close elections have taken several forms in American history. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr finished with identical electoral vote totals, and the House of Representatives needed 36 ballots to break the deadlock. In 1824, no candidate reached an electoral majority at all, and the House chose the president from the top three finishers. In 1876, 1888 and 2000, the candidate who drew the most votes nationwide did not take office. In 1916, the result hung on a single state's slow count, and the apparent winner on election night turned out to have lost.

Several of these contests rewrote the rules that followed them. The 1800 deadlock produced the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which separated the balloting for president and vice president. The disputed count of 1876 was settled through the bargaining that ended Reconstruction in the South. The Florida recount of 2000 led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which funded the replacement of punch-card machines and set federal standards for voting systems.

This list runs chronologically through 10 of the closest elections in U.S. history, with the certified margins behind each one. Some turned on a few thousand votes spread across tens of millions of ballots. Others came down to a single electoral vote, a commission split along party lines, or a Supreme Court ruling. Together they show how narrow the distance between winning and losing the presidency has sometimes been, and how often the mechanics of counting, rather than the campaign itself, determined who governed.

1800: Jefferson and Burr's electoral tie

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each finished with 73 electoral votes in 1800, an exact tie that sent the presidency to the House of Representatives. Breaking the deadlock took 36 ballots, and Jefferson was not declared the winner until February 1801, weeks before Inauguration Day.

The tie came out of the original constitutional design rather than a genuinely split electorate. Under the rules then in force, each elector cast two votes for president, and whoever finished second became vice president. Jefferson and Burr ran together on the Democratic-Republican ticket, with Jefferson understood to be the presidential candidate, but the ballots drew no distinction between the two offices. Every Democratic-Republican elector voted for both men, and the ticket produced two candidates with identical totals.

The House voted by state delegation, each state casting a single vote, with a majority of states needed to win. The chamber was still controlled by lame-duck Federalists who had just lost power at the polls, and many of them preferred Burr, or at least preferred to block Jefferson. Ballot after ballot produced the same split, leaving Jefferson short of the threshold.

Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who considered Burr the greater danger, pressed members of his own party to stand down. On the 36th ballot, enough Federalist representatives cast blank ballots or abstained for Jefferson to carry a majority of state delegations. Burr became vice president. The rivalry between the two men hardened from there and ended in the 1804 duel in which Burr killed Hamilton.

Congress then moved to make the scenario impossible to repeat. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, required electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president, and that system still governs presidential elections.

The 1800 contest is also remembered as the first transfer of national power between opposing American political factions, from John Adams's Federalists to Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. What made it close was not a thin margin of votes but the absence of any margin at all.

1824: The House decides without a majority winner

Andrew Jackson finished first in both the popular vote and the electoral vote in 1824 and still lost the presidency. His 99 electoral votes fell short of the majority required, so the decision moved to the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams instead.

The field was crowded because the Democratic-Republicans had effectively become the country's only national party, and four of its figures ran against one another. Adams took 84 electoral votes, Treasury Secretary William Crawford took 41, and House Speaker Henry Clay took 37. With 261 electoral votes in play, no one reached the 131 needed to win outright. Jackson's popular vote lead came from the 18 states that let voters pick electors; six state legislatures still made the choice themselves.

The 12th Amendment, written after the deadlock of 1800, specified what happened next. The House would choose from the top three electoral vote finishers, with each state delegation casting a single vote regardless of its size. That cutoff eliminated Clay, who had placed fourth, even though he presided over the chamber that would now decide the outcome.

Clay threw his influence behind Adams, whose views on federally funded roads, canals and a national bank aligned more closely with his own than Jackson's did. In February 1825, the House elected Adams on the first ballot, with 13 of 24 state delegations supporting him. Adams then named Clay his secretary of state, a........

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