from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office." Congress would eventually enact the Electoral Count Act in 1887 to provide more detailed rules for the counting of electoral votes, especially in cases of multiple slates of electors being received from a single state. Results According to the commission's rulings, of the 2,249 counties and independent cities making returns, Tilden won in 1,301 (57.85%), and Hayes carried only 947 (42.11%). One county (0.04%) in Nevada split evenly between Tilden and Hayes. The Greenback ticket did not have a major impact on the election's outcome by attracting slightly under one percent of the popular vote, Cooper nonetheless had the strongest performance of any third-party presidential candidate since John Bell in 1860. The Greenbacks' best showings were in Kansas, where Cooper earned just over six percent of the vote, and in Indiana, where he earned 17,207 votes, which far exceeded Tilden's margin of victory of roughly 5,500 votes over Hayes in that state. The election of 1876 was the last one held before the end of the Reconstruction era, which sought to protect the rights of African Americans in the South, who usually voted for Republican presidential candidates. No antebellum slave state would be carried by a Republican again until the 1896 realignment, which saw William McKinley carry Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky. No Republican presidential candidate until Warren G. Harding in 1920 would carry any states that seceded and joined the Confederacy. That year, he carried Tennessee, which had never experienced a long period of occupation by federal troops and had been completely "reconstructed" well before the first presidential election of the Reconstruction period (1868). None of the Southern states that experienced long periods of occupation by federal troops was carried by a Republican again until Herbert Hoover in 1928, when he won Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, and that proved the last election in which the Republican candidate won Louisiana until 1956, when it was carried by Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the last in which the Republican candidate won South Carolina until 1964, when Barry Goldwater did. The next time those two states voted against the Democrats was their support of the "Dixiecrat" candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948. Although 1876 marked the last competitive two-party election in the South