ELECTORAL COMMISSION - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

ELECTORAL COMMISSIONAuthored

The Law Mind • 918 words

Definition

An electoral commission is a body created by legislative or constitutional authority to resolve disputed elections or to administer and certify electoral processes. The term carries two distinct senses in American legal history:

1. HISTORICAL (THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION OF 1877): A specific, one-time federal body established by Congress to adjudicate the contested presidential election of 1876. Created by the Act of January 29, 1877, the Commission was composed of five U.S. Senators, five members of the House of Representatives, and five Justices of the Supreme Court, and was charged with determining the validity of disputed electoral votes from three states. Its decisions resolved the deadlock in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes.

2. GENERAL: Any standing or ad hoc body established by statute, constitutional provision, or executive authority to oversee, administer, or adjudicate electoral matters — including vote counting, candidate qualification, campaign finance oversight, and election dispute resolution. In this broader sense, the term encompasses state-level boards of elections, federal bodies such as the Federal Election Commission, and international election monitoring bodies, though none of these are typically called "electoral commissions" in standard American usage.

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Common Confusion

The Electoral Commission of 1877 is frequently confused with the Electoral College, the permanent constitutional mechanism through which presidential electors cast votes. The two are entirely distinct: the Electoral College is a constitutional institution that operates in every presidential election, while the Electoral Commission was a one-time legislative creation designed to resolve a specific crisis when the Electoral College process produced a contested outcome. Researchers should also avoid conflating the Electoral Commission with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the modern regulatory agency established in 1974 to administer campaign finance law. These bodies share no structural relationship.

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Why It Matters in Research

The term "electoral commission" presents a significant historical specificity trap. In American legal sources, the phrase almost always refers to the 1877 body unless the researcher is working with comparative law materials or foreign legal systems, where standing electoral commissions are common governmental institutions. Researchers working in nineteenth-century federal legislative history, constitutional crisis literature, or presidential election law will encounter this term as a proper noun referring exclusively to the 1877 Commission.

The 1877 Commission matters beyond its historical moment. It generated substantial congressional debate about the constitutional limits of legislative power to resolve presidential election disputes, questions that have never been fully settled and that resurfaced prominently in academic and judicial discourse following the 2000 presidential election. Researchers tracing the constitutional law of electoral dispute resolution should treat the Commission's enabling act and the debates surrounding it as foundational primary sources.

Be alert to anachronistic cross-referencing: modern encyclopedia treatments of the Electoral College often discuss the 1877 Commission as a cautionary episode in constitutional design, but earlier dictionary and encyclopedia entries treat it as current law or recent precedent. The Commission's authority was explicitly ad hoc and expired once its determinations were made; it created no standing precedent or permanent institutional structure.

Jurisdictional variation in the use of the broader term is sharp. Many foreign legal systems — including the United Kingdom, Canada, and much of the Commonwealth — use "electoral commission" to describe permanent administrative bodies analogous to the American FEC or state boards of elections. Researchers working in comparative constitutional law must anchor the term carefully to its jurisdictional context.

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Historical Dictionary Support

Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines the Electoral Commission specifically as the body created by the Act of January 29, 1877, to decide questions arising from the presidential election of November 1876, in which Hayes and Wheeler (Republican) faced Tilden and Hendricks (Democratic). Bouvier notes the election's outcome hinged on disputed electoral votes from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and that the Commission was constituted to resolve those disputes.

Bouvier's entry, while accurate as a historical description, reflects the Commission's moment: it treats the body as a significant and recent constitutional event rather than as a closed historical episode. The entry does not address the broader or comparative meaning of the term, nor does it assess the Commission's constitutional legitimacy or lasting legal effect — questions that later scholarship treated as genuinely contested. Researchers should not rely on Bouvier alone for the Commission's procedural history or the legal arguments made before it; congressional records and contemporary legal periodicals are the more complete sources for that material.

No major American legal dictionary of the period provides a general definition of "electoral commission" as a category of governmental institution, which itself reflects how thoroughly the term was understood as a reference to the 1877 body alone.

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Jurisdictional Note

In American law, "electoral commission" refers primarily to the 1877 federal body and carries no standing institutional meaning at the federal level today. Several U.S. states use the phrase to describe state-level election oversight boards, but usage is inconsistent. In Commonwealth and civil law jurisdictions, "electoral commission" commonly denotes a permanent, independent administrative authority. Researchers must establish jurisdictional context before interpreting the term in any source.

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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia: "The Electoral College -- Constitutional Design and Reform Proposals" — covers the constitutional framework within which the 1877 Commission operated and the reform debates it has informed.

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ELECTORAL COMMISSIONmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

commission created by an act of congress of January 29, 1877, to decide certain ques- tions arising out of the presidential election of November, 1876, in which Hayes and Wheeler had been candidates of the repub- lican party and Tilden and Hendricks of the democratic party. The election was very close, and depended on the electoral votes of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. It was feared that there would be much trouble at the final count- ing of the votes by the president of the senate according to the plan laid down in the Constitution. The republicans had a majority in the senate and the democrats had a majority in the house of representa- tives. A resolution was adopted by con- gress for the appointment of a committee of seven members by the speaker to act in conjunction with a similar committee that might be appointed by the senate to pre- pare a report and plan for the creation of a tribunal to count the electoral votes whose authority no one could question and whose decision all could accept as final. The joint committee thus appoint- ed reported a bill providing for a commis- sion of fifteen members, to be composed of five members from each house appoint- ed viva voce, with four associate justices of the supreme court, which latter would select another of the justices of the supreme court, the entire commission to be presided over by the associate justice longest in com- mission. This body has since been known as the Electoral Commission. Justices Clifford, Miller, Field, and Strong were named in the act as members, and they chose as the fifth justice Justice Brad- ley. The other members were Senators Bayard, Edmunds, Frelinghuysen, Morton, and Thurman, and Representatives Abbott, Garfield, Hoar, Hunton, and Payne. The commission began its sessions Feb- ruary 1, and completed its work March 2, 1877. Various questions came before it in regard to the electoral vote of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as to which of two state returns was valid, and as to the eligibility of certain of the pre- sidential electors. The most important de- cision of the commission and the one which has caused most comment and criti- cism was to the effect that the regular returns from a state must be accepted, and that the commission had no power to go behind these returns; or, as the commis- sion itself expressed it, "that it is not competent under the Constitution and the law as it existed at the date of the passage of said act, to go into evidence aliunde the papers opened by the president of the senate in the presence of the two houses, to prove that other persons than those reg. ularly certified to by the governor of the state of Florida in and according to the determination and declaration of their ap- pointment by the Board of State Canvas- sers of said state prior to the time required for the performance of their duties, had been appointed electors, or by counter-proof to show that they had not, and that all proceedings of the courts or acts of the legislature or of the executive of Florida subsequent to the casting of the votes of the electors on the prescribed day are inad- missible for any such purpose." Curtis, Constitutional History of the United States, vol. 2, 419. The result of the controversy over the election of 1876 was the passage, after long and earnest consideration, of the Act of Congress of Feb. 8, 1887, to regulate the counting of the electoral votes for presi- dent and vice-president. U. S. Rev. St. 1 Supp. 525. See PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS ;

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