An example with corruption is in the election of 1800. Burgh (do not remember his name.. ) basically bought twelve electoral votes in New York City to reassure the election of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's fingerprints were not on it. Jefferson claimed he did not know. If you're going to act in behalf of a respected candidate then your going to be sure that the candidate himself has deniability.
Your information about the 1800 election is not quite correct. NY State had a total of 12 electors .In 1796 all 12 went for John Adams . But in 1800 the 12 NY electors voted for Jefferson. That switch was mostly the result of Burr's organizing a political machine in NYC(Tammany Society )... btw a burgh is a geographical political unit much like a district ,village,town,parish etc.
This switch horrified Hamilton who considered Burr an
"embryonic Caesar" (later events after Hamilton's death would prove he was right about Burr) .
Hamilton tried to get NY Governor John Jay to call a special session of the legislature to change the rules about electors so that NY would send electors based on proportional results of the popular election in the state instead of the winner take all format. That may have made the difference in the national election resulting in an Adams reelection .( a shift of five votes would have been enough to put Adams into first place ) . But the point is that all the electors were legitimately chosen under the State rules.
Jay refused to change the electoral procedure . It would've been unprecedented to change the rules after the vote had taken place. But Hamilton did not trust the Jeffersonians and felt justified .
That was the nature of the political division at the time.In a way there was reason to distrust Jefferson. He was a great admirer of the French Revolution and the Federalist did fear the mob rule mentality .There was also a concern that Jefferson was not fully committed to a federal system in the 1st place. He was luckily away on assignment when the Constitution was debated ,and did not influence the outcome.
As it turned out ,once in power Jefferson was quite content (despite his anti-federalist leanings) to become a strong executive... in fact ,in the case of the Lousiana purchase ,he stretched executive powers to the limit and beyond.