AmericanHeritage.com / Blog: Lincoln's Plan to Battle the Electoral College

AmericanHeritage.com / Blog: Lincoln's Plan to Battle the Electoral College

Lincoln used junk mail to urge tactical voting in the three-way Republican - Whig - Democrat presidential race of 1856: "Lincoln gave the subject of electoral voting a great deal of thought. Perhaps too much. In the drive to make people understand, he grew desperate. He stooped low: He invented junk mail. (It is one of the more shocking revelations I was forced to make in my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln.) In Illinois, at any rate, junk mail had never been seen before--a printed letter carefully disguised as a handwritten one and distributed in bulk to unsuspecting voters. The subject was the electoral outlook, and the theme was that either people played the system's game or risked wasting their votes."