Timing and Sequence in Congressional Elections: Interstate Contagion and America's Nineteenth-Century Scheduling Regime

. . . [T]he advantages of uniformity are incontestable. The exaggerated and unreasonable influence of the September-voting States upon the October-voting States, and of these in turn upon the November-voting States, has for many years been notorious. It is, of course, absurd that elections in one part of the country, which may have turned on special causes, should influence all the rest of the Union.