General Records of the U.S. Government: Electors' Certificates for the 1948 Presidential Election (Record Group 11)

These records consist of certificates of votes cast by the Electoral College in the 1948 presidential election, along with an official pamphlet from the Department of State and related legal documents.

Size: 5 linear inches (about 250 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: Documents prepared by United States Government employees in the course of their official duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in documents that do not fall into this category is presumed to remain with the authors of the documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Peter W. Bunce (1971); Cassie Coffman (2013).

The General Records of the U.S. Government (Record Group 11) include certificates of votes cast by members of the Electoral College in the 1948 presidential election.

These records consist of certificates of votes cast by the Electoral College in the 1948 presidential election. President Harry S. Truman won the election with 303 electoral votes. Governor Thomas E. Dewey received 189 votes, and Governor J. Strom Thurmond received 39 votes.

The records are arranged alphabetically by state. For each of the forty-eight states, there is a certificate signed by the state's electors indicating their votes for president and vice president. There are also certified enumerations of the popular votes cast for electors in the general election of November 1948, signed by each state's governor or secretary of state.

Also included in the records are the official seals of each state and certificates recording the filling of vacancies in the Electoral College. These vacancies were created when electors were absent on the day the votes were cast.

An official State Department pamphlet, Presidential Elections: Provisions of the Constitution and of the United States Code, is filed at the beginning of the collection.