Sometimes I hear on the news about countries with electoral irregularities. An international observer sometimes reports that there were suspicious circumstances during an election. I'm wondering if a well developed democracy, like the U.S., used to have election irregularities?
The Broad Seal War comes to mind. In the election of 1838, there was a difficulty with the election results from New Jersey. At the time, elections for New Jersey congressional representatives were determined by vote taken from the entire state. NJ had no congressional districts and no electors. The election results that year for the US House of Representatives between the Democratic ticket and the Whig ticket were very close--something like only 100 votes.
It was discovered later that the one of the county clerks in NJ threw out the election results for a couple of towns (thus favoring the Whigs) because they hadn't been properly sealed by the town clerks--some said he threw them out on a technicality that would normally be overlooked and others claimed that the votes had been opened and tampered with.
So when it came time to seat the members of the House of Representatives in December, the clerk began to call the roll and then everything got into an uproar when he reached New Jersey and he couldn't figure what names to call because both delegations from the Democrats and the Whigs had come to the House to be seated. Not counting the NJ delegation (6 seats), the House consisted of 119 Democrats and 118 Whigs. Needless to say, the NJ delegation would tip the balance of power.
The dispute grew so heated that the House was unable to organize itself and couldn't even manage to elect a speaker of the house for a couple of weeks--business that's usually over and done the first day of the session. Once the House finally organized, neither NJ delegation was seated while the matter was investigated. Basically, NJ remained unrepresented in the House until March when the NJ Democrats were seated and served the remainder of their terms.
So, in that case, anyway, there wasn't anything like an international observer around, and it doesn't seem that there was wide-spread national irregularities, but apparently the actions of relatively few people within a single county in New Jersey had a significant national consequence in the election of 1838.