How did U.S. manage to hold an election in 1864 during the civil war? And better yet, how does any country hold an election during wartime?

The war zone was in the South. Northern states experienced little disruption of normal activities (except for specific, short-term events such as Lee’s raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1863). State governments had no trouble keeping to the normal political schedule. The only really new factor was the “soldier vote,” how to handle voting by thousands of men who were away from home in the Union Army. Whole regiments were furloughed to allow then to go home and vote. As you can see in the picture above, some states organized what we would now call absentee voting by providing ballots and ballot boxes to regiments from their states that were in the field.

By the fall of 1864, things were looking up for the Union, and the soldiers, by and large, wanted to see the war through. The soldiers mostly spurned the Democratic nominee, former general George McClellan, and voted for Lincoln.