Did PA vote by general ticket at that time? I had thought it voted in districts. I know one of its votes went to Adams.
It voted by general ticket. I'll quote from an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
***
(1) "Republican newspapers charged the Federalists with fraudulent voting
in Pennsylvania, where the popular vote was very close, and in one
Maryland district where four votes separated the two parties; but their
protests were unheeded." Eugene Roseboom and Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., *A
History of Presidential Elections (4th ed. 1979), p. 20. Considering that
Adams won 71 electoral votes and Jefferson 68, and that 70 electoral votes
constituted a majority, a very slight change of the vote in Maryland and
Pennsylvania could have elected Jefferson president--assuming that the
elected-by-four-votes elector in Maryland was *not* the one who cast his
vote for both Adams and Jefferson.
As for Pennsylvania, which unlike Maryland elected its electors at large,
("in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire by popular vote for a general ticket"
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a2_1_2-3s6.html), the
race is described as follows at
http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=59540
"The PA vote was razor-tight, with many precincts and three counties not
reporting. Other precincts and counties were challenged. The Governor
tried to collect all the returns but finally had to give up and certify
the 98% of the vote that he had in hand: a Jefferson victory with 50.2% of
the vote, good for a 13-2 electoral vote win." Had the race been a little
more in Jefferson's favor, the one Adams elector (I mean the one Adams
elector who actually voted for Adams--see below...) might have been
defeated.
The Republicans, in any event, do not seem to have pressed the "fraud"
argument. (After all, the Pennsylvania results had been certified by
Governor Mifflin, a respected moderate "who avoided commitment to any
party but leaned toward the Jeffersonians."
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/pahist/civil.asp?secid=31) "Jefferson
symbolized the mood of reconciliation by visiting Adams and pledging his
strong support. Even Jarvis, an ardent pro-Republican editor in Boston,
pronounced himself reconciled to Adams' election on the grounds that it
was impossible for the new President to be worse than Washington." Page
Smith, "The Election of 1796" in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L.
Israel and William P. Hansen (eds) *History of American Presidential
Elections 1789-1968, Volume I 1789-1824* (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers 1985), p. 73.
(2) "A second [Pennsylvania] elector, reputedly a Federalist, voted for
Pinckney and Jefferson" according to Roseboom and Eckes. Obviously, the
defeat of *this* elector would not have helped Jefferson. I'm not sure
what motivated this first "faithless elector," Samuel Miles, the former
Mayor of Philadelphia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Miles Could
he have been an anyone-but-Adams Hamiltonian? Or on the contrary, so
ultra-moderate a Federalist that he didn't think Jefferson was so bad? In
any event, while there may have been a "13-2 electoral vote win" for the
*Republicans* in Pennsylvania, there was a 14-1 electoral vote victory for
*Jefferson.* An angry Pennsylvania voter wrote to the *Gazette of the
United States*: "What, do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me
whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I choose
him to act, not to think."
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/faithless.htm)
BTW, this was not the last time that a state choosing electors at large
would nevertheless split its electoral vote (even without "faithless
electors"). In very close elections during the nineteenth century, it
sometimes happened that the most popular candidate for elector for the
otherwise losing presidential candidate in a state got a few more votes
than the least popular candidate for elector for the otherwise winning
presidential candidate. This may be the explanation of why one Adams
elector (leaving aside the "faithless" Miles) did manage to get elected.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/gylFcseS-_0/L2Ow9SbiV5YJ