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All 352 electoral votes of the Electoral College 177 electoral votes needed to win |
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Turnout | 71.3% 6.8 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Grant/Wilson, steel blue denotes the three Georgia electoral votes won by Greeley, the other shades of blue denote those won by Hendricks, Brown, Jenkins, and Davis; this reflects the posthumous scattering of Greeley's electoral votes. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
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The United States presidential election of 1872 was the 22nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1872. The incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant was easily elected to a second term in office, with Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as his running mate. Grant's decisive re-election was achieved in the face of a split within the Republican Party that resulted in a third party of Liberal Republicans nominating Horace Greeley to oppose Grant. This action caused the Democratic Party to cancel its convention, support Greeley as well, and not nominate a candidate of its own.
On November 29, 1872, after the popular vote was counted, but before the Electoral College cast its votes, Greeley died. As a result, electors previously committed to Greeley voted for four different candidates for president and eight different candidates for vice-president. Greeley himself received three posthumous electoral votes, but these votes were disallowed by Congress. The election of 1872 is the only United States presidential election in which a major party nominee died during the electoral process. It was the last instance until the 2016 presidential election in which more than one presidential elector voted for a candidate to whom they were not pledged.