The midterms end tonight, November 3. Four days later, on Saturday, November 7, the country crosses an anniversary almost nobody has circled on the calendar. It is one hundred fifty years since the presidential election of 1876, the night the United States voted and then could not say who had won. The count ran for four months. It finished in a borrowed courtroom and then in the House chamber, in the small hours of a March morning, by a margin of one electoral vote. Congress resolved it with a procedure invented on the spot. The price was collected from people who had no seat in the room, and they kept paying it for the better part of ninety years. I count 1876 the worst election in American history. The election of 1860 brought on a war, but its count was honest; in 1876 the count itself was the fraud. The country is still legislating in its shadow, and this is a good week to read the record it left.

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