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I. Introduction
Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution states: “Each House shall
be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members…” With this
simple statement, each chamber of Congress is granted complete authority over how its
membership will be comprised.
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Thus, when a given election is contested, that is, when there is
a dispute over who is the rightful occupant of a given seat after the ballots have been collected
and tallied, each chamber acts as the sole arbiter without external constraint.
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This constitutional
guarantee was an artifact of English and colonial rule, as fear of executive authority led the
House of Commons and nearly every colonial legislature to adopt similar protections (Dempsey
1956, pp. 12-20, 25-28).
This paper investigates the procedures and outcomes in contested election cases in one
chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, across time. The subject of contested
elections has not received a great deal of scholarly treatment in recent years. Older studies such
as Dawes (1870), Rammelkamp (1905), Alexander (1916), and Barnett (1939) provide excellent
historical overviews and valuable contextual accounts, but contemporary political scientists have
virtually ignored the subject. In fact, no published studies investigating contested elections
specifically have appeared in the post-WW II era to update our collective knowledge.
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1
Various attempts have been made over time to appeal (and modify) this congressional right, without success. On
the last occasion, in the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case of Roudebush v. Hartke, involving a Senate election contest,
the Court ruled that each chamber of Congress, per the guidelines of the Constitution, retains the unconditional and
final judgment in contested election cases.
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The term “contested election” is not to be confused with the term “contested race,” which denotes that more than
one major candidate is seeking a congressional seat.
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Dempsey (1956) is an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, which provides excellent historical background and a rich
source of data on contested elections. Galloway (1962), Polsby (1968), and Martis (1989), among others, provide
brief overviews of contested elections, and while useful, their accounts are largely derivative. Seip (1983, pp. 106-
08), Bensel (1984), and Valelly (2003) offer fresh connections between contested elections and larger
institutional/electoral forces, but their coverage is limited.
Convention