Lively Thought

The New Yorker’s Politics Issue had some great reads in it, including the eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama, and the fascinating profile of Arianna Huffington, but my favourite piece was written by Jill Lepore and titled Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is an historical overview of the messiness and madness of the American electoral process. In particular, the piece focuses on the adoption of the secret ballot (also known as the “Australian Ballot“) in the United States.

One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore  tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.

Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...]  Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.

Violence and intimidation at the polls was common in this era. That is true not only in the U.S., but here in Canada as well. (According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, British Columbia adopted the secret ballot in 1873, Ontario in 1874, and P.E.I. didn’t adopt it permanently until 1913.) The primary reason, it seems, that violence flourished at the polls at this time in history was that suffrage was expanding faster than the mechanisms needed to handle it.

In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

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With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.

In almost any technological revolution, change tends to happen slowly and then all at once. This is certainly the case for the modern secret ballot. Voting by voice, or by show of hands, are the most natural methods we have of expressing our desires so it is natural that we would have stuck to that method for so long. The next step in the voting revolution is using some object to record the vote. Lepore writes:

The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballotta, or little ball, and a ballot often was a ball, or at least something ballish, like a pea or a pebble, or, not uncommonly, a bullet. Colonial Pennsylvanians commonly voted by tossing beans into a hat. Paper voting wasn’t meant to conceal anyone’s vote; it was just easier than counting beans. Our forebears considered casting a “secret ballot” cowardly, underhanded, and despicable; as one South Carolinian put it, voting secretly would “destroy that noble generous openness that is characteristick of an Englishman.”

Today, of course, we realize that the secrecy of our ballot allows each of us to vote our conscience. It permits us freedom from intimidation and it also cripples the plans of those who would buy votes, for there is no way to ensure that someone taking “the soap,” as election day payoffs came to be known, will not take the money and then vote as they please.

It is not mentioned often enough, but we owe the miraculous invention of the modern secret ballot to Australia.

An electoral law, with ballot clauses written by a jurist named Henry Samuel Chapman, was passed in Victoria, Australia, in March of 1856. (A similar law, championed by Francis S. Dutton, was passed in South Australia the following month, and whether Chapman or Dutton or someone else is more justifiably dubbed the Father of the Ballot has been a matter strenuously debated.) 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.

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that change the world. This is certainly an example of that. Not everyone was convinced of the wisdom of this invention, however. Surprisingly, one of the most vocal and articulate opponents of the secret ballot was Lively Thought hero, John Stuart Mill.

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.

The crucial thing that Mill misses here is that congressmen or parliamentarians are not only casting their votes on their own behalf, but also on behalf of their electors. Their vote must be public not because politicians are immune from intimidation or coercion, far from it, but rather because in a system of representative democracy, the electors must know how votes are being cast on their behalf. It’s the only way they can decide who their representatives should be.

On the individual level, however, whether you consider voting a right or a trust, people must be allowed to cast their votes without the fear of reprisal. Private votes need not be selfish votes, but it is impossible for a man to vote even in what he considers to be the public interest, if his employer or neighbour or the thug on the street have a different idea then him as to what the public interest is.

However, lest we believe that the secret ballot was adopted solely out of higher principles, Lepore reminds us that pre-printed ballots set up a new barrier to voting: the ability to read. This was an efficient means of disenfranchising some voters.

A government-printed ballot that voters had, even minimally, to read made it much harder for immigrants, former slaves, and the uneducated poor to vote. Some precincts formally imposed and selectively administered literacy tests; others resorted to ranker chicanery. (In 1894, one Virginian congressional district printed its ballots in Gothic letters.) In the South, where black men had been granted suffrage in 1870, by the Fifteenth Amendment, it was fear of the black Republican majority that led many former Confederate states to adopt the reform in the first place.

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The year after Arkansas passed its Australian-ballot law, the percentage of black men who managed to vote dropped from seventy-one to thirty-eight.”

Democracy might always be imperfect, its mechanisms are clearly still a work in progress. Every advance, from secret ballots, to punch cards and their hanging chads, and the disaster of electronic voting machines presents its own set of challenges and threatens to disenfranchise a different set of voters. What is amazing, and what is communicated so well by Lepore’s piece, is that even though the system we have is messy and imperfect, it is still a beautiful thing to behold. “Patches upon patches” have never looked so good.