Although I cannot comment on the elections in the latter half of the 19th century, I can speak briefly about the 1824 election - and more broadly about how we need to understand the political environment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

To the vast majority of people, 'democracy' did not mean the same thing in the first half of the 19th century as it means to us today. The electoral system used in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand (and Australia historically, though Australia's voting system changed in the 20th century), the British Caribbean and a few other former British colonies has its legal ancestry in a 15th century declaration by the English Crown that the selection of representatives to the Parliament of England should always without exception be decided par le plus grand nombre (French still being the language of public law at the time), a term which was perhaps best captured in English when some early American colonial legislatures defined the principle as election by a plurality of voices. This system which we now call First Past the Post, in which electors make their choice of representative or leader known and the candidate with the single largest share of the votes wins even if less than half of all electors support them, has remained mostly unchanged in England and North America. In this sense - in the notion of electing representatives to deliberative bodies and in the method of that election - American democracy has a very old heritage.

But if the structure has remained broadly the same, the way people were expected to engage with it has changed very radically. Most British scholars consider modern parliamentary democracy to only begin with the 1832 election, half a century on from American independence. It was the first time in British history that a list of eligible voters was created with legal systems for preventing voter fraud; in which electoral boundaries were drawn in a somewhat fair way; voting had to take place in a tightly fixed period of time; and there was a standard, uniform eligibility criteria for voting. America inherited nothing like this from the British on independence. Democracy in the late 1700s and early 1800s was a very different affair, and most of the practices Americans are familiar with today in how they vote are innovations that emerged either organically in the United States themselves or after inspiration from other countries around the world. And in the political culture of the 1824 election, the notion of a 'popular vote' in national elections did not particularly make sense to the vast majority of people.

In the first instance, not everyone was entitled to vote for the President or in any other federal election in 1824. The US Constitution distinguishes implicitly between a right to be represented and a right to choose your representatives; although states were to be represented in Congress and thus the Electoral College proportionate to their population, not every state would necessarily be expected to have the same number of eligible voters. The right to vote in the early United States was restricted heavily to men and, more than that, to men of wealth and station who could prove they owned a certain value of property. The necessary value of property could differ from state to state and states were allowed to determine voter eligibility as they saw fit. What mattered in much of this period was not the balance of public opinion as much as what the wealthy white male elite of each state felt was in the best interests of their state or locality. The 1824 election came at the tail end of the period in US history when the majority of white men still could not vote.

More significantly though, not every state at this time chose their presidential electors by popular vote. Although it was agreed and recognised that the Electoral College needed to reflect the will of eligible voters in the states, six states at this time - Delaware, Georgia, Vermont, South Carolina, New York and Louisiana - had their electoral college representatives elected by members of the state legislature instead. In these states voters elected their representatives to the state legislature who then, in turn, made a decision about how the state should vote in the presidential election on their behalf and as such those states did not have a popular vote to report. It is thus very difficult to say that there was a winner or loser of the popular vote in 1824 because there were really two separate elections to determine the President of the United States: the direct election held in states where the Electoral College was chosen by popular vote, and the earlier indirect elections to pick members of state legislature in the other half a dozen states. We can only say for 1824 that the winner of the election failed to win the popular vote in the states where voters cast direct ballots, not that this would have necessarily been the outcome of the poll if every eligible voter in every state had voted directly on the question of who should be President. This arrangement is less anomalous than it sounds to contemporary American ears as well. Virginia, for example, was a parliamentary democracy in which the Governor of the state was chosen by the state legislature until the 1850s; so too was New Hampshire where a collective leadership was chosen with a notional President (later Governor) only, whilst Maryland for its early history had an unusual system of electing its Governor by letting one-third of the state vote each time, ensuring Governors represented different parts of the state's interests. This was not yet a time when there was an expected uniformity in the form and practice of American democracy.

In addition the experience of casting your ballot in a presidential election was very different in 1824. Political parties were still in their infancy in the early 19th century and represented broad-based, diverse factions united over often vague rather than concrete goals without formal structures or organisations to support them; the first party convention in the US wasn't held until 1832. Instead of turning up to vote for Candidate X for President you still voted for individual electors in the Electoral College and the candidates themselves did not have a formal 'party machine' behind them. For example although Massachusetts had 15 electoral votes as John Quincy Adams' home state, there was no 'slate' of electors for Jackson or any of the other candidates - but a total of 29 people were seriously contesting the ballot. We do not know how any of those 14 people would have voted if they had won one of the 15 slots for election - possibly still for Adams, but possibly for Jackson or another candidate in the election or someone not even formally in the election. There was also considerable vote splitting where individuals might split their votes if they had multiple. Again in Massachusetts the most popular candidate for the Electoral College was local judge William Walker who topped the poll with 37,891 - 7,000 votes more than the other 14 electors received for Adams. Likewise, vote totals for the other unsuccessful candidates vary from 6,900 to just less than 6,000, whilst one candidate attained just 400 votes. Wikipedia - and many sources - take the approach of averaging out votes in this situation, but this distorts the outcome of the ballot locally for the sake of creating a more cohesive and easy to follow national narrative. The truth is that whilst Wikipedia lists electors for Adams as winning 30,687 votes or 72.9% of the ballot, in fact, supporters of Adams Electors cast 467,838 votes to choose them - 83.9% of the total number of votes cast. Vote scattering and the uneven contesting of elections by electors formally pledged to candidates is a real challenge to trying to estimate the popular vote within a single area where voters could vote for a slate rather than just individuals in 1824.

So although 1824 is often the starting point for modern critics of the Electoral College as a system for selecting the President, those criticisms - which rest fundamentally on the premise either that winner-takes-all voting is not democratic or that the President should be directly elected by popular vote - are not helpful for understanding the results of the 1824 election. There was no neat way to determine a nation-wide popular vote in 1824 and a political culture that had still not yet even accepted universal male suffrage or the direct election of the Electoral College by voters rather than legislatures had no need for such a concept. In addition there were no formally, strongly organised parties to suffer structural advantage or disadvantage from the allocation of representation in Congress or the Electoral College, nor did political campaigning exist in the way we understand it today (a whole other topic). When thinking about Electoral College reform as either a modern or historic issue, the election of 1824 is so far removed from later electoral practices in the United States it is not terribly worth including in the discussion except as the example of the first contingent election in the House of Representatives.