The discussion of strategic voting and agenda manipulation tends to be highly abstract. Most real‐world examples are either artificial or politically insignificant; the few paradigmatic examples which do exist are discussed again and again. This is one reason why many empirically minded political scientists often ignore the whole social choice approach. The purpose of this article is to focus on a single event ‐ the election of the Finnish President in 1956 ‐ and to show that almost all theoretically interesting phenomena studied in the social‐choice literature were present. The paper is based on empirical material, especially on subjective descriptions provided by the main actors. This kind of approach is recommended as a complement to the deductive‐theoretical