A presidential election was held in Indiana on November 5, 1872, as part of the 1872 United States presidential election. The Republican ticket of the incumbent president Ulysses S. Grant and the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts Henry Wilson defeated the Liberal Republican and Democratic ticket of the editor of the New-York Tribune and former U.S. representative from New York's 6th congressional district Horace Greeley and the governor of Missouri B. Gratz Brown. Grant defeated Greeley in the national election with 286 electoral votes.
General election
Summary
Indiana chose 15 electors in a statewide general election. Nineteenth-century presidential elections used a form of block voting that allowed voters to modify the electoral list nominated by a political party before submitting their ballots. Because voters elected each member of the Electoral College individually, electors nominated by the same party often received differing numbers of votes as a consequence of voter rolloff, split-ticket voting, or electoral fusion. This table reflects the statewide popular vote as calculated by Walter Dean Burnham in his influential study, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892, including 1,417 votes for Charles O'Conor listed in the appendix which cannot be tabulated by county. Svend Petersen's later study includes these votes while reporting similar totals to Burnham for Grant and Greeley.