Deep South making up one-fourth the Confederate voting population, split 57 percent Breckinridge versus 43 percent for the two pro-union candidates. The four states that were admitted to the Confederacy after Fort Sumter held almost half its population, and voted a narrow combined majority of 53 percent for the pro-union candidates. In the eleven states that would later declare their secession from the Union and be controlled by Confederate armies, ballots for Lincoln were cast only in Virginia, where he received 1,929 votes (1.15 percent of the total). Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the votes Lincoln received were cast in border counties of what would soon become West Virginia – the future state accounted for 1,832 of Lincoln's 1,929 votes. Lincoln received no votes at all in 121 of the state's then-145 counties (including 31 of the 50 that would form West Virginia), received a single vote in three counties and received ten or fewer votes in nine of the 24 counties where he polled votes. Lincoln's best results, by far, were in the four counties that comprised the state's northern panhandle, a region which had long felt alienated from Richmond, was economically and culturally linked to its neighbors Ohio and Pennsylvania and would become the key driver in the successful effort to form a separate state. Hancock County (Virginia's northernmost at the time) returned Lincoln's best result – he polled over 40% of the vote there and finished in second place (Lincoln polled only eight votes fewer than Breckinridge). Of the 97 votes cast for Lincoln in the state's post-1863 boundaries, 93 were polled in four counties along the Potomac River and four were tallied in the coastal city of Portsmouth. Some key differences between modern elections and the those of the mid-nineteenth century are that at the time, not only was there was no secret ballot anywhere in the United States, but the state did not print and distribute ballots. In theory, any document containing a valid or at least non-excessive number names of citizens of a particular state (provided they were eligible to vote in the electoral college within that state) might have been accepted as a valid presidential ballot, however what this meant in practice was that a candidate's campaign was responsible for printing and distributing their own ballots (this service was typically done by supportive newspaper publishers). Moreover, since voters did not choose the president