Importance of One Vote

• The tally for voting for the Declaration of Independence was close. Congress had to wait for uninstructed delegates to return to Philadelphia. Caesar Rodney, suffering from asthma and cancer, rode 80 miles from his Delaware home to the sweltering capital on the night of July 1, 1776, in order to break a tie in his state’s delegation and carry the motion for independence.
• In 1783, Congress failed by one vote to adopt Thomas Jefferson’s motion to ban slavery forever from the trans-Appalachian west.
• In the summer of 1842, Henry Shoemaker nearly missed voting for a state representative. His vote later proved to be a contested ballot. There wasn’t a ticket available listing all the candidates Shoemaker wanted to vote for, so he took out his knife and cut out names from four different tickets in order to cast his ballot. At that time, state legislators elected U.S. senators. In January of 1843, Madison Marsh who Shoemaker helped to elect, changed his vote on the sixth ballot, electing Democrat Edward Hannegan to the United States Senate…by one vote. In 1846, a caucus vote in the U.S. Senate was deadlocked until the absent Senator Hannegan was called. He cast his vote in favor of war. One of the results of that war was that California changed hands from Mexico to the United States.
• In addition to California, one vote gave statehood to Texas (1845), Oregon (1859), Washington (1889), and Idaho (1890).
• Women won the right to vote in 1920 by passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution. Tennessee, the last state needed to pass the amendment, ratified the amendment by one vote.