In the Deep South, Clay lost every state to Polk, a huge reversal from the 1840 race, but carried most of the Middle and Border South. Clay's "waffling" on Texas may have cost him the 41 electoral votes of New York and Michigan. The former slaveholder, now abolitionist, James Birney of the Liberty Party, received 15,812 and 3,632 votes, respectively, on the basis of his unwavering stand against Texas annexation. Celebratory shots rang out in Washington on November 7 as returns came in from western New York which clinched the state and the presidency for Polk. Polk won by a mere 5,106 out of 470,062 cast in New York, and only 3,422 out of 52,096 votes in Michigan. Had enough of these voting blocks cast their ballots for the anti-annexationist Clay in either state, he would have defeated Polk. Still, Clay's opposition to annexation and western slavery expansion served him well among Northern Whigs and nearly secured him the election. As of 2020, Clay was the third of seven presidential nominees to win a significant number of electoral votes in at least three elections, the others being Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Of these, Jackson, Cleveland, and Roosevelt also won the popular vote in at least three elections. Clay and Bryan are the only two candidates to lose the presidency three times. This was the first time that the winning candidate lost their home state, which also occurred in 1916, 1968, and 2016. And along with 2016, this is one of two victorious presidential nominees to win without either their home state or birth state (in this case, both were Tennessee and North Carolina). Allegations of fraud Upon the conclusion of the election, Whig publications were disheartened at the loss of Henry Clay's alleged fraud against the Clay ticket. The Whig Almanac, a yearly collection of political statistics and events of interest to the party, contained in 1845 a column alleging fraud in Louisiana. It noted that, in one Louisiana parish, Plaquemines, the vote tally exploded from a 240 to 40 vote victory for the Van Buren ticket in 1840 to a 1007 to 37 vote victory for the Polk ticket in 1844. The 970 vote margin was greater than Polk's margin statewide. The 1,007 votes received by Polk exceeded the total number of all white males in the parish