Rock, Paper, Scissors: How we used to vote: Early paper voting was, to say the least, a hassle. You had to bring your own ballot, a scrap of paper. You had to (a) remember and (b) know how to spell the name of every candidate and office. […]
As suffrage expanded—by the time Andrew Jackson was elected President, in 1828, nearly all white men could vote—scrap voting had become a travesty, not least because the newest members of the electorate, poor men and immigrants, were the least likely to know how to write. […]
Political parties, whose rise to power was made possible by the rise of the paper ballot, stepped in. Party leaders began to print ballots, often in newspapers: either long strips, listing an entire slate, or pages meant to be cut in pieces, one for each candidate. At first, this looked to be illegal. […]
Undeniably, party tickets led to massive fraud and intimidation. A candidate had to pay party leaders a hefty sum to put his name on the ballot and to cover the costs of printing tickets, buying votes, and hiring thugs, called “shoulder-strikers,” to tussle with voters. […]
In 1830, the Scottish Benthamite James Mill argued for a secret ballot in order to curb the influence of landlords upon their tenants and factory owners upon their workers. […]
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, someone came up with a startling idea. What if governments were to provide the ballots?
The precise origins of this idea are somewhat murky. An electoral law, with ballot clauses written by a jurist named Henry Samuel Chapman, was passed in Victoria, Australia, in March of 1856. […]
Victoria’s Electoral Act of 1856 minutely detailed the conduct of elections, requiring that election officials print ballots and erect a booth or hire rooms, to be divided into compartments where voters could mark those ballots secretly, and barring anyone else from entering the polling place. […]
This, of course, is exactly how we vote in the United States today. […]
When the Australian ballot was propounded in Britain, James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, became its most articulate opponent. […] Voting, Mill insisted, is not a right but a trust: if it were a right, who could blame a voter for selling it? Every man’s vote must be public for the same reason that votes on the floor of the legislature are public. If a congressman or a Member of Parliament could conceal his vote, would we not expect him to vote badly, in his own interest and not in ours? A secret vote is, by definition, a selfish vote. Only if a man votes “under the eye and criticism of the public” will he put public interest above his own. […]
Mill’s argument was widely debated, but met with a practical-minded reply: even if voting is a public trust (which not all of Mill’s opponents granted), voters need to exercise it privately to exercise it well, because the electorate, unlike the legislature, consists of men of unequal rank. The powerless will always be prevailed upon by the powerful; only secrecy can protect them from bribery and bullying. […]
By 1896, Americans in thirty-nine out of forty-five states cast secret, government-printed ballots. The turnout, nationwide? Eighty per cent, which was about what it had been since the eighteen-thirties. It has been falling, more or less steadily, ever since. […]
(This year, an unusually high turnout is expected, but high, by our standards, would be more than sixty per cent. And if four out of ten of the nation’s eligible voters fail to turn up at the polls it won’t be for lack of ordinary courage.) It also contributed to the erosion of the notion of voting as a public trust.
