Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Lincoln was therefore the second President-elect to poll no votes in some states which had a popular vote (the first was John Quincy Adams, who polled no ballots in the popular votes of two states in the election of 1824, the only other election in which there were four major candidates, none of whom distributed ballots in every state). It should be further noted that, prior to introduction of the secret ballot in the 1880s, the concept of ballot access did not exist in the sense it does today: there was no standardized state-issued ballot for a candidate to "appear" on. Instead, presidential ballots were printed and distributed by agents of the candidates and their parties, who organized slates of would-be electors publicly pledged to vote for a particular candidate. The 1824 and 1860 presidential elections were the only two prior to the introduction of the secret ballot where a winning candidate was so unpopular in a particular region that it was impossible to organize and print ballots for a slate of eligible voters pledged to vote for that candidate in an entire state. Since 1860, and excluding unreconstructed Southern states in 1868 and 1872, there have been two occasions where a Republican presidential candidate failed to poll votes in every state, while national Democratic candidates have failed to appear on all state ballots in three elections since the introduction of the secret ballot, though in all three, the Democratic candidate nonetheless won the presidency , but none of them were off the ballot in as many states as Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln won the second-lowest share of the popular vote among all winning presidential candidates in U.S. history. Lincoln's share of the popular vote would likely have been even lower if there had been a popular vote in South Carolina, though conversely it would likely have been marginally higher had he been on the ballot in all of the Southern states. The Republican victory resulted from the concentration of votes in the free states, which together controlled a majority of the presidential electors. Lincoln's strategy was deliberately focused, in collaboration with Republican Party Chairman Thurlow Weed, on expanding on the states Frémont won four years earlier: New York was critical with 35 Electoral College votes, 11.5 percent of the total, and with Pennsylvania (27) and Ohio (23) as well, a candidate