This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History Of The Printed Ballot [1st Edition] 1616898879, 9781616898878, 161689931X, 9781616899318

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 3
Copyright......Page 4
CONTENTS......Page 5
THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION OF DEMOCRACY......Page 7
CORN AND BEANS......Page 11
SUFFRAGE IS RELATIVE......Page 13
POLITICAL PARTY PARTY......Page 15
OLD SACKS AND BLUEGRASS......Page 17
DODGING, PASTING, AND TAPEWORMS......Page 19
PURITY OF THE BOX......Page 20
CONVERTING SWINE INTO PORK......Page 21
KANGAROO VOTING......Page 24
CLEAN WHITE PAPER......Page 26
A SWORD TOO CLUMSY TO WIELD......Page 27
PERFECT MACHINES......Page 29
A SUPERABUNDANT FORCE......Page 31
PLATES......Page 33
NEW ANXIETIES AND OLD FRIENDS......Page 165
THE MOST FUGITIVE EPHEMERA......Page 172
NEW ANXIETIES AND OLD FRIENDS......Page 173
IMAGE CREDITS......Page 174
ABOUT THE AUTHORS......Page 175
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 176

Citation preview

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKED LIKE h

A Visual History of the Printed Ballot h

Alicia Yin Cheng

P R I N C E TO N A R C H I T ECT U R A L P R E S S N E W YO R K

To my mother, who showed me joy, and to my daughter, who gives me hope.

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 202 Warren Street Hudson, New York 12534 www.papress.com © 2020 Alicia Yin Cheng All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Editor: Sara Stemen Design: MGMT. design Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN: 978-1-61689-887-8 ISBN: 978-1-61689-931-8 (epub, mobi) Library of Congress control number: 2019951971 Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1878. American Antiquarian Society. BACK COVER: Regular Citizens Independent Ticket, California, ca. late 1890s. California Historical Society. FRONT COVER:

CONTENTS

THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION OF DEMOCRACY

Julian E. Zelizer 7 THE MOST FUGITIVE EPHEMERA

Alicia Yin Cheng 11 PLATES 33 NEW ANXIETIES AND OLD FRIENDS

Victoria Bassetti 165 NOTES 172 IMAGE CREDITS 174 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 175 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 176

THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION OF DEMOCRACY

Julian E. Zelizer

Among the most enduring images from the controversial 2000 presidential election was the “butterfly” ballot. The design of the ballot that was used in Palm Beach County, Florida, created an utter disaster. Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach election supervisor who was responsible for the design, had meant to make things easier. “I was trying to make the print bigger so elderly people in Palm Beach County can read it,” she said.1 But many elderly voters were confused by the way that the candidates’ names were lined up. A substantial number of these voters, who were Jewish and liberal, accidentally offered their support to third-party candidate Pat Buchanan, a conservative with a checkered history of anti-Semitism, instead of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore. The bitter fight that unfolded about the design of this ballot and others in Florida was a vivid reminder of the physical dimension of democracy. During the recount process that followed election day, Americans watched on television as officials used magnifying glasses to figure out what these and other ballots said about the intention of voters. While many of the histories of this country revolve around the great ideas of our political system or the institutional design that the founders created with the Constitution, we know too little about the actual mechanisms through which people participate in making our government work. The ballot is among the most fundamental components of our democracy. The ballot has literally been the way that people make their choice about who should lead them and how the government will register the final decision of the electorate. The ballot itself, which has been paper for most of our history, has been inscribed into the memorabilia that collectors find and history museums preserve. But the history of the ballot is something that we must pay much greater attention to. As the controversy

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over the 2000 election revealed, the structure and design of the ballot can have enormous consequences for how our politics function or fail us. In times before ballots were secret, this piece of paper could be used as a mechanism of intimidation and persuasion, since everyone could see who a voter was supporting. Parties also used the ballot to trick voters in certain cases. In 1857 some Democrats printed ballots with a font meant to look like the one on Republican ballots so that voters would be confused.2 The color of the document or the size of the print also had the potential to mark the voting process. Throughout our history, the way in which the names of parties and candidates were listed and the visuals that were used could favor certain parties or persons and make it difficult for others to gain attention. For African Americans, women, and poor Americans, the paper ballot had enormous importance at different moments as the pathway to full citizenship. Mere access to this treasured piece of paper was what separated those who were disenfranchised from those who wielded the political power. Americans fought over the design of the ballot as part of the ongoing contest over power. At the same time that some party leaders were determined to preserve ballots that could be easily corrupted, reformers fought for ones that would protect the ability of voters to make their decisions and ensure that every vote was counted. Even the way in which individuals cast their ballots evolved, with greater protections created over time. In 1888, when municipal elections in Louisville, Kentucky, became the first to use the Australian Ballot, which was cast in secret, one writer noted: “The election last Tuesday was the first municipal election I have ever known which was not bought outright.”3 In recent years, however, the displacement of the paper ballot by the electronic voting machine has raised all sorts of new issues, including the possibility of hacking by overseas governments. The following pages offer one of the best visual histories of the ballot that we have available. Readers are taken on a wonderful tour of what voting looked like and what enfranchised America saw when they made their decisions. Through these images, we see the design, the evolution, and the complexities of American democracy in action. The book is a reminder that on election day, the ways in which we process our choices have had as many consequences as what politicians promise and the factors that guide the final decision of the electorate.

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Diagram of sample polling arrangement, 1889.

T H E P H Y S I C A L D I M E N S I O N O F D E M O C R ACY 9

THE MOST FUGITIVE EPHEMERA

Alicia Yin Cheng

It is the most potent of all sheets of paper: the ballot.1 PHILIP LORING ALLEN, 1906

CORN AND BEANS

As a material tool of democracy, the ballot should not, by its nature, be collectible. Legally required to be destroyed within a certain period after an election, surviving tickets are usually the result of an election officer who used a ballot to write down a tally and kept that record in his personal papers. Early ballots were easier to pocket, before regulations made election officers liable for all unaccounted ballots. Others must have been kept surreptitiously, but it is hard to know precisely just how these ballots managed to survive. One collector aptly described the election ballot as “the most fugitive ephemera.”2 Before there were paper ballots in America, there was the human voice. Using the viva voce system, a practice with roots in ancient Greece, eligible voters would announce the names of their preferred candidates to a government clerk who registered votes in a pollbook. Election judges and the candidates were present, and the nominee would formally acknowledge each vote by bowing and thanking the voter.3 But even by 1786, that system was recognized to be imperfect. A commenter from New Jersey expressed polite concern that the public declaration of one’s vote “openly wounded the tender sensibilities of friendship.”4 Some residents of the American colonies cast their votes with corn and beans— corn for yea, beans for nay. Often bodies would suffice: in Kentucky, some local elections were decided by counting the number of supporters lined up on opposite

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sides of a road. These motley systems worked fine for small-scale local elections but got trickier with larger crowds. In 1790, the population of the early republic was less than four million. In the next twenty years, it nearly doubled, making the viva voce method even more unwieldy. By the end of the century, every state had adopted voting “by papers” except for Kentucky, where the state legislature stuck to voting by voice until as late as 1890. In the early days of the republic, the use of the paper ballot was far from systematically enforced, and each municipality had its own requirements. Early paper ballots were simple letterpress slips of different sizes that sometimes listed just a single name; on other ballots, the office title was printed and voters wrote their preferences underneath by hand. Voters could also cut out preprinted ballots from broadsides or newspapers. Back then, there were many ways to cast a vote, but all of them required some effort. Printed ballots embody the material history of democracy in the United States: its ideals, its routines, and its abuses. Their typography, their designs, and even the paper they were printed on have a story to tell. They speak to changing notions of what elections are, whom they include and exclude, and the political possibilities they offer: these artifacts reflect efforts to control the ostensible free will of the voter as well as how generations between the 1800s and today have accepted, rejected, and fought for the power of the ballot.

The County Election, George Caleb Bingham, 1854.

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SUFFRAGE IS RELATIVE

Vaguely and half unconsciously, but every day more and more, the masses hug the flattering illusion that one man is essentially about as good as another.5 FRANCIS PARKMAN, 18 78

The social history of ballots is directly linked to the history of suffrage: Who should have the privilege to choose our political leaders? The right to vote in the early days of the nation could be summarized in three words: “landed white males.” But closer examination of suffrage qualifications reveals even more specific rules detailing just how much land you needed to own, which religious faiths were permissible, and exactly how white was white. Good character and intelligence were cited as key attributes; Massachusetts required good citizens to “not be vicious in life” and disenfranchised “lyers [sic], drunkards, swearers and those refusing to take the oath of fidelity to the government.”6 In North Carolina, election officials complained that “Jews, strangers, sailors, servants, negroes and Frenchmen”could vote.7 Americans loved their freedom, as long it was given to the right people. Voting rights expanded dramatically between 1790 and the 1850s, but it was an inconsistent, complicated process, as historian Alexander Keyssar described: The buoyant optimism about popular participation, so visible in the 1830s and 1840s, gave way to apprehension and fear by the late 1870s and 1880s....Overall, the period witnessed a checkered tale of motion forward, backward, and sideways, of local peculiarities and surprises, of a rapidly changing, increasingly heterogenous society contending awkwardly with its own professed political values.8

From 1800 to 1850, the population grew from 5.3 million to an unprecedented 23 million as waves of immigrants arrived from Europe, a large proportion of those from Ireland. Voting rights––while still a patchwork that varied from locality to locality— expanded as property requirements were eased, a process that accelerated during the administration of Andrew Jackson. “Old Hickory” was elected in 1829 on an antiestablishment, populist platform that promoted the participation of the common man in government. During his administration, electoral changes were made to dramatically expand the democratic franchise. Instead of being appointed, more government officials now had to gain office by popular vote. More candidates were running for more offices, and more men were allowed to vote. The small group of party elites who chose presidential nominees was also subject to a popular vote. On a local level, more municipal offices were directly elected rather than appointed, and terms of office were often as short as two years or less. By 1856, all thirty-four states had adopted universal suffrage for all white males.

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Over the next decades, the country would undergo a traumatic civil war, slavery would be abolished, and millions of immigrants from China and elsewhere would continue to arrive. The introduction of new ethnic, religious, and foreign textures to the heretofore predominantly white multitudes inspired growing alarm: in 1840, diarist Philip Hone wrote fearfully of the “the heterogenous mass of vile humanity in our population.”9 Initial enthusiasm for universal manhood suffrage began to wane, and restricting the electoral franchise became a more common tactic in the middle nineteenth century. Historian Kirk Porter observed, “On the Pacific coast the Chinaman was excluded with violent indignation. On the Atlantic cost the Irishman was the object of execration....But everywhere the door was slammed in the face of the Negro.”10 Native Americans were targeted as well, with states passing constitutional provisions to “prevent the wild tribes from voting” or specifying that the word “white” should designate not just “not black” but also not “copper-color.”11 While these laws were inclusive in their exclusion, suffrage requirements still applied only to men. And while the women’s suffrage movement began as early as the 1840s, it wasn’t until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that women gained the right to vote—in 1920.

“Diagram of the Rise and Fall of American Political Parties, from 1789 to 1880, inclusive,” from The Conspectus of the History of Political Parties and the Federal Government, by Walter R. Houghton, 1880.

T H I S I S W H AT D E M O C R ACY LO O K E D L I K E 14

POLITICAL PARTY PARTY

Courting popularity and attempting to gain the affections of the people...has oftener produced tyrants or demagogues...than patriots and good government.12 JOHN PAGE, C ONGRE SSMAN FROM VIRGINIA, 1 7 94

In his famous farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned Americans against “faction politics,” calling the domination of one political group over another a “frightful despotism.”13 But as the percentage of the population with voting rights expanded during the nineteenth century, partisanship was inevitable, giving rise to a mind-boggling number of political parties and splinter groups that far surpassed the current two major parties of today’s system. Election tickets from the early to mid-nineteenth century reflected a wide array of political descriptors: Liberal Democrats and Regular Democrats, Liberal Republicans, Regular Republicans and Democrat-Republicans, the Free Soil Party, the People’s Party, the Citizens Party, and the Labor Reform Party, as well as the Prohibition and Temperance Parties, the Greenback Party, and the Regular Anti-Chinese

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“Scene at the polls, New York City. Boxes for the distribution of tickets. Everybody busy.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 15, 1856.

Party, to name a few. The rapidly changing political landscape meant that getting elected took a lot more effort, organization, and funding. This required a higher-level model of campaign manager to run things, as well as a new breed of candidate: the professional politician. By the mid-nineteenth century, the days where “the office should seek the man, not the man the office” were over.14 Voting was still an open system: neither secret nor systematic nor orderly. On election day, party workers handed out ballots from booths set up near the polling stations, soliciting voters and persuading the undecided. Voters were handed prefilled election tickets that listed all the party candidates as a “straight ticket”; these could be deposited directly into the ballot box with no need to make selections or marks of any kind. Attempting to vote a “split ticket” with candidates from different parties required the voter to attach two ballots together, making it tempting to just surrender to an entire party lineup. The growing investment in campaign finances meant there was more money to fund the increasingly elaborate election machine: political races produced a vast number of broadsides, handbills, posters, ephemera, and election tickets for multiple campaigns going on at both the municipal and state levels. This increasing demand for ink on paper initiated a number of contemporaneous innovations in the 1800s, not only in the machinery of American politics but also in the materials and machinery of graphic production.

 

T H I S I S W H AT D E M O C R ACY LO O K E D L I K E 16

OLD SACKS AND BLUEGRASS

The manufacture of paper, though an interesting process to witness, is difficult to describe intelligibly.15 JOEL MUNSELL , 18 76

Paper played a critical role in American democracy. Originally manufactured by hand using linen and cotton rags, paper was laborious and time-intensive to make, with a standard-size mill producing an average of only two reams of paper per day. As demand for newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides increased during the Civil War, a rag shortage required supplies to be imported from Europe and as far afield as Asia and Egypt. Although a mechanized process for papermaking had been introduced in the early 1800s, allowing for faster production, quantities were still restricted by the limited availability of rags. Papermakers constantly experimented with a range of processes and materials, including asbestos, bluegrass, banana leaves, asparagus, hornets’ nests, old sacks, horseradish, cabbage stumps, and manure. By the 1860s, technical innovations using wood pulp combined with rags allowed paper to be manufactured at a larger industrial scale for the first time. While paper was becoming less expensive and easier to produce, the invention of the steam-driven cylinder press in the 1840s allowed printing to become faster, all while a growing network of steamboats, canals, and railroads enabled printed matter to be distributed to more people. Literacy rates surged as reading materials became affordable to the nonwealthy and schoolchildren could have personal copies of spelling primers. Smaller platen presses powered by foot treadles enabled even the smallest towns to have their own weekly publications, inspiring Scottish author Thomas Hamilton to observe: “The influence and circulation of newspapers is great beyond anything ever known in Europe. In truth, nine tenths of the population read nothing else....Every village, nay, almost every hamlet, has its press.... Newspapers penetrate to every crevice of the union.”16

Platen press, 1892.

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More partisan, sensationalist reporting met the growing public appetite for news, and vitriolic campaign newspapers were a feature of nineteenth-century elections. Editors were often richly rewarded for printing fiery political tirades against opposition candidates, and short-run publications produced for the duration of campaign periods had colorful names like the Polk-er, The Rough and Ready, and the opposition’s counter masthead, The Tough and Steady. Historian Frank Luther Mott noted that the newspapers in the first half of the nineteenth century “reflected the crassness of the American society of the times. Scurrility, assaults, corruption, blatancy were commonplace. Journalism had grown too fast.”17 The dramatic pace of typographic and printing innovation during the nineteenth century resulted in the typographic and ornamental exuberance that is the hallmark of the Victorian period and reflected in the ballots of that era. Letterpress printing was the common, largely monochromatic process: compositions were restricted to a rectilinear grid, and typefaces were laboriously cast by hand from metal or wood. Automatic type-casting machines, invented in the 1840s, used hot, molten metal alloys poured into forms that allowed more refined and delicate designs. American type foundries competed to offer the widest array of novelty styles, creating massive catalogs of type specimens for every occasion. The invention of lithography and chromolithography in the 1830s allowed a compositor to create hand-drawn layouts directly on a stone, which was then prepared with multiple coatings of oil-based inks. This freehand method allowed for the reproduction of a continuous tone and inspired more decorative compositions with integrated type, image, and ornaments, unrestricted by the strict metal grid of letterpress. Letterpress printers responded to the challenge by creating their own compositions, ingeniously using their existing tools to create contortive typographic layouts, patterns, and embellishments that had never been seen before. Printers were outdoing themselves—all for pieces of ephemera that were meant to be used just once. Compositions and aesthetic choices that seem outlandish and baffling to us now may have had a strategic use on the ballot. Fanciful styles and unconventional typography may have been encouraged by party bosses not only to be distinctive during the chaos of election day but also to deliberately mislead inattentive voters and encourage fraudulent behavior at the polls. The volume and frequency of campaign materials made any regulation and oversight by the state governments nearly impossible, meaning that the parties were essentially entrusted with that responsibility. With this outright monopoly of the ballot from the inside, the party foxes were in charge of the electoral henhouse.

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DODGING, PASTING, AND TAPEWORMS

I cannot attempt to describe the complicated and varying election laws of the different States.18 JAME S BRYCE, 18 8 8

Election fraud is as old as elections themselves. Since parties printed and distributed the ballots, the system was ripe for a multitude of abuses. Nothing ensured that the ballots produced by the parties were correct: there were no regulations dictating when nominees for office were announced, and candidates were often removed or replaced at the last minute. Imagine that change order as you labored over a lithographic stone, trying to fit all the candidates’ names in by hand. Ballots tended to be a compact and portable size, about five inches wide by seven inches tall, and there was a lot to fit in: with the density of races, it was no surprise that numerous voters did not even read their ballots, let alone know for whom they had voted. It was far easier to just take the ticket provided by the party peddler, accept some ready cash and a slug of free whiskey, and deposit it directly into the ballot box ... If it was a challenging task to parse a ballot when sober, it was even more so when inebriated from the “treating” that was rampant on election day (more on that soon). Ballot modifications were not discouraged by the candidates and were so habitual that small strips of gummed paper called “pasters” would be sent to voters or made available at the polls. Glue pots were provided at polling stations so voters could stick alternative candidate names on top of the printed ones. To foil pasters or write-ins, graphic countermeasures were applied: elaborately curved type, unorthodox stylistic combinations, and ornamental infills that covered every inch of space, making edits more difficult. Motivated voters could still squeeze in modifications to the ballot despite the lack of open space, and early tickets show extensive handwritten amendments on top of the printed words, early evidence of the need for self-expression. Other ballots had elaborate designs on the backs, not only to make them more attractive but also to make them distinctive so that party enforcers could be assured their money was well spent. Some states tried ensuring the security of the vote with envelopes; others tried systems of ballot folding or numbering or required voters to sign their ballots to prove their identity. Systems were tried and tested, but up until the late 1880s, there were no mandated requirements for safeguarding the ballot. One stolen ballot could start an endless chain of ballot stuffing. Known as “repeating,” or, more colorfully, the “Tasmanian Dodge,” an unmarked ballot would be marked outside the polling place by a party boss and given to a bought voter. The voter would receive a blank ballot on entering the polling place but would deposit the

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premarked ballot. He then would hand over his unused clean ballot to be marked again, and the chain would continue. Another, more recherché type of ballot fraud practiced in South Carolina in 1880 employed “tissue ballots,” one ballot that contained several ballots printed on very thin stock. Nested together, these ballots would look singular, but when shaken inside the ballot box, they would multiply from one vote to many. No artifact of this type of ballot remains. One extreme format that bordered on the absurd was the “tapeworm ballot” used in California in 1871. Measuring only slightly larger than a fortune cookie slip, it listed twenty-six candidates, from governor to constable, as well as two constitutional amendments. The type was so minuscule that it was impossible for voters to amend. But it still served as a functioning ballot, and the Tapeworm Ticket won handily. The microscopic format worked so well the first time, the party tried it again a month later in a subsequent election, this time with an even smaller version. This, apparently, was the straw that broke the regulatory back in California: that year, the secretary of state recommended that the state supply a sanctioned stock, printed only with black type at a specified size, and that there be “no distinguishing marks.” That was the beginning of both watershed election reform measures and the demise of freewheeling ballot design.

Tapeworm ballot, California, 1871.

PURITY OF THE BOX

[We] have but one desire and that is, an honest expression of the will of the people through the ballot box.19 A SSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK , C OMMIT TEE ON GRIEVANCE S, 18 5 7

Casting a vote wasn’t the only challenge to the voter—depositing it was a whole other affair. Hats were long used as vote containers in America, as they had been in ancient Greece. In the late 1800s, the ballot container began to represent efforts to literally secure election results, graduating from a hat to a solid, tamperproof box often made of

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wood with a hinged lid. As an additional safeguard, the lid would often have a lock requiring two keys held by opposing party representatives. In 1856, a ballot box was seized in San Francisco that revealed hidden side panels and a false bottom containing premarked ballots. Applying pressure on certain areas opened the lid, allowing access without the keys. The blatant fraud of the Stuffer’s Box prompted huge public Jollie’s glass ballot box, 1857.

outcry and inspired Samuel Jollie to invent a glass ballot box later that year. A glass sphere contained within an

open, cube-shaped structure with four metal columns and a hinged ornamental lid, the box had a small hole at the top to receive rolled-up ballots. Delicate and elegant, Jollie’s box served as a formal counterpoint to the Stuffer’s Box. Providing literal transparency, this device, which was put to limited use (mainly in San Francisco and New York), was depicted in political illustrations of the day as a symbol of “pure democracy.” Sometimes there was more than one ballot box. Parties often facilitated straightticket voting for multiple races by preparing bundles of tickets to be handed directly to voters. The entire bundle would be passed on to the election officials, who would then sort the tickets into individual ballot boxes, one for each office. Congressional accounts from 1863 describe one big box measuring six feet long with eight separate holes at the top for each of eight offices. Another idea called for stamped metal ballots of variable sizes with corresponding slots of variable widths. I couldn’t find visual evidence of these, sadly. CONVERTING SWINE INTO PORK

A large proportion of...the voting population depended upon election day as a regular source of income.20 NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, 18 8 3

Election day in the mid-nineteenth century was the culmination of a sustained period of intense excitement and active public participation that often lasted for months, featuring marches, speeches, parades, barbeques, music, fireworks, bell ringing, bonfires, steer roasts, and cannon fire. Planned skirmishes were not uncommon to deter elderly or timid voters for the opposing party; women were discouraged from attending. Following the recent war with Mexico, political parties had a paramilitary structure and militialike marching clubs were formed in support of the candidates. With names

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like the Wide Awakes, the Boys in Blue, and the Ever Readies, the uniformed groups marched in formation and held massive rallies that involved entire communities. Election day itself was a public holiday; open bets on election results were common, and estimating attendance at rallies was a popular sport. While the American public seemed to relish the political spectacle, the French historian and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 that holding elections so frequently may not have been good for our collective temperament: When elections recur only at long intervals, the state is exposed to violent agitation every time they take place....When elections occur frequently, their recurrence keeps society in a feverish excitement, and gives a continual instability to public affairs. Thus, on the one hand, the state is exposed to the perils of a revolution, on the other, to perpetual mutability; the former system threatens the very existence of the government, the latter prevents any steady and consistent policy. The Americans have preferred the second of these evils to the first; but they were led to this conclusion by instinct more than reason, for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy.21

In frontier settlements, local taverns served as polling places and votes could be bought by ready cash, a ladleful of whiskey, or other favors. An account from newspaperman Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy’s memoirs describes an 1858 election in Wisconsin: I bought and paid for...ten gallons of liquor....Then I brought in from the kitchen a clean washtub, poured half of the whisky into it, supplied the outfit with a tin dipper, and appointed a stout Belgian farmer to take charge of it and treat men as they came in—with Judge Larabee’s compliments. It was not long before the tavern was full of voters, as election day they all come out to meet each other and to vote.... About halfpast ten voting began, all the tickets voted being handed to me for inspection. Those for Larabee went into the ballot box; those for his opponent went into the fire, as no good. Before noon all had voted, and the result was about 200 for Larabee, and three votes, I believe, was the number for Billinghurst.22

Another method of election fraud relied on personal grooming. Using a technique described as voting “by whiskers,” men would start with a full beard, then, after casting their first vote of the day, they were taken to a barber to “scrape off the chin fringe” to vote again. Then again with “side lilacs and a mustache.” And again with just a mustache. If the voting tally required further help, another trip to the barber for a clean shave allowed a vote “plain face.” One man, one beard, five votes.23 Party operators also employed more aggressive techniques called “cooping,” where drunk and indigent men were rounded up and kept in a back room until election day, when they were forced to make the rounds to polling sites to repeatedly vote for the right candidate. The waves of new immigrants often arrived with no means and were especially susceptible to the predatory practices of societies like Tammany Hall. Deeply enmeshed in the workings of the Democratic-Republican party machine, Tammany

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“Boss Tweed: ‘As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it? say?’” Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, October 1871.

Hall and its leader, William “Boss” Tweed, played a major role in the nineteenthcentury political scene in New York City and the state. Providing basic necessities like coal, food, and medical care to poor immigrants effectively bought political loyalty and opportunities for exploitation. In a speech to Congress in 1879, Representative William Frye from Maine described the level of electoral corruption at the height of Boss Tweed’s power: Frauds were stupendous; illegal registration and repeating seemed almost to be the rule....Rum ran in streams; and riot, assaults and murders were the order. The courts were started, and...they ground out citizens at the rate of one thousand a day, with no more solemnity than and quite as much celerity as is displayed in converting swine into pork in a Cincinnati packing house.24

Areas were divided into a decentralized system of individual wards, led by a boss who served as a local vote gatherer and patron. Boss Tweed’s testimony to the Special Committees of the Board of Aldermen is a chilling account of the total dominance of the boss system in New York City: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A:

Now, Mr. Tweed, when you were in office, did the ring control the elections in this city? They did absolutely. How did you control the election? Well, each ward had a representative man who could control matters in his own ward, and whom the various members of the general committee were to look up to for advice how to control elections. What were they to do in case you wanted one man elected over another? Count the ballots in bulk, or without consulting them announce the result in bulk, or change from one to the other, as the case may have been. Then these elections were really no elections at all? The ballots made no result. The counters made the result.25

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 KANGAROO VOTING

The Australian law is an ambuscade for cheating and knavery.26 NEW-YORK TRIBUNE, 18 9 5

By the 1880s, voters and governmental officials in the majority of states had had enough of a partisan voting system that was unsystematized, untrustworthy, and susceptible to corruption. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe in Australia, a new ballot system was afoot that was radically different from earlier reform efforts. This new approach established fundamental principles and conditions that we take for granted today: standardized official ballots would be prepared and administered by the state; all candidates would be listed on a single, consolidated, nonpartisan layout; and ballots were to be distributed only at the polling place. The key innovation of the Australian ballot? That the act of voting would be secret. First proposed in 1851, the Australian system was adopted eight years later in Tasmania and New South Wales. As increasingly egregious forms of electoral fraud came to light in the United States during the 1880s, ballot reform gained significant momentum, and by the 1908 presidential election of William Howard Taft, thirty-two states out of forty-six had ratified the new ballot system. The new, impartial instrument not only offered voters privacy but also allowed a selection of candidates across party lines. The secret ballot was credited with giving value back to the vote, treating it as a private privilege and not a commodity for sale. Despite the major flaws of an open voting system, there were still those who believed that a public declaration was the only option for an independent man of honor. Some critics declared the new system a form of electoral repression and complained that “whatever tends to impair or restrict the right of franchise, to limit the number of voters, or to vex or harass them in the exercise of this most important duty is pernicious and

Election handbill, 1888.

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dangerous.”27 Other arguments against the “kangaroo vote” claimed that it would be inordinately expensive because of the sheer size of the ballot, that the process of marking the ballot would take too long and be too taxing for voters, and that the new structure was biased toward candidates with an unfair alphabetical advantage. The introduction of the Australian system also saw the beginning of what was to be an enduring history of contested voter intent and disputed mark making. Other detractors claimed that an official, preprinted ballot limited voters’ choices to only the names listed. Being able to vote for whomever you wanted, whether their names were on the ballot or not, was seen as an inherent right, and anything that might impede this was thought to discriminate against the “liberty of nomination.”28 The inclusion of a write-in area on contemporary ballots is a testament to the demand for free expression and protest that endures to this day. Other Progressive Era reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped clean up ancillary aspects of the voting experience. Restricting electioneering within one hundred feet of a polling place and banning the sale of alcohol on election day had an immediate effect on decorum, making the once raucous spectacles “as peaceful as [the] Sabbaths.”29 In 1892, Massachusetts lawyer and political activist Richard Henry Dana III observed:  Quiet, order, and cleanliness reign in and about polling places. I have visited precincts where, under the old system, coats were torn off the backs of voters, where ballots of one kind have been snatched from voters’ hands and others put in their places, with threats against using any but the substituted ballots; and under the new system all was orderly and peaceable. Indeed, the self-respect in voting under the new system is alone worth all the extra expense to the state.30

The speed by which the new system was adopted was not necessarily the result of honorable statesmen protecting the integrity of American democracy. State legislators controlled all aspects of the bureaucracy, consolidating the balance of power and allowing them to wield partisan influence more effectively and efficiently. With the adoption of the Australian ballot, parties were able to create laws that could work in their electoral favor without the trouble and expense of printing their own tickets or hiring an army of party heelers to rally votes one by one. The Australian ballot helped deter frauds like stuffing the ballot box by changing one’s facial hair, but other methods of disenfranchisement remained. Each state and often each city had different voter requirements that were often weak disguises for voter suppression, targeting working-class, poor, and ethnically undesirable voters; New York City required voters to register in person on a Jewish holiday, for example. While it hadn’t been so easy to cast your vote before the Australian system, it became even harder: citizens needed a high level of literacy, an awareness of the candidates

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and offices, and the time and patience to complete the ballot accurately. Compare that to just taking a ticket and putting it in a box, and it is no surprise voter participation numbers went down in the period immediately following its introduction. As one historian put it, “The Australian ballot did not decrease the extent of fraud; it only changed the way the fraud occurred.”31 CLEAN WHITE PAPER

The criteria of a good ballot form are hard to determine.32 O. DOUGL A S WEEKS, 194 2

Uniformity of production specifications was recognized as a key aspect of keeping the ballot secret. The majority of states left it to election officers to regulate production details but demanded that it should be “impossible to distinguish any one of the ballots from the other ballots.” Requirements decreed that ballots be printed on “clean white paper, with no distinguishing marks.” Iowa specified that ballots should be printed on “good quality plain white paper through which printing or writing cannot be read.” Some states provided the paper themselves. New York was explicit, stipulating: “All ballots of the same kind for the same polling place shall be of precisely the same size, quality and shade of paper, and of precisely the same kind and arrangement of type and tint of ink.”33 The specifications are a long read. Quantity and distribution methods varied. Usually the law stated that one hundred ballots should be furnished for every fifty voters, sealed in packages and given to a city clerk. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island required two sets of ballots to be prepared, one set held in reserve for an emergency. This process reads soundly, but imagine the drama of finding a typo or the last-minute addition of a candidate’s name, which would require plates to be redone and the entire print run scrapped. The Australian system also presented new challenges for voters, who needed to pay attention to mark-making instructions that were not always intuitive but nonetheless critical: any irregularities invalidated the vote. Each state had mind-numbing specifics that defined an acceptable mark: Utah required that “two straight lines be as nearly equal in length and cross each other as near the center of each line as practiceable.” New Jersey allowed a plus sign, but if you were in North Carolina, a check mark would do. Pay attention if you lived in Arkansas, where you had to strike out the names of the candidates or measures you did NOT want (horizontal lines, please, not vertical...that was in Texas). California provided rubber stamps to make a uniform mark; Indiana insisted voters use a specific type of blue pencil that had to be returned after voting, then destroyed after the election.34

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A SWORD TOO CLUMSY TO WIELD

If [the people] do not take an interest in a given ballot, there are two solutions—change the people or change the ballot. As the people are too big to be spanked, and since human nature in the mass responds but slowly to prayer, it is good sense to change the ballot.35 RICHARD CHILDS, 191 1

The main provision of the Australian ballot was that all candidates’ names must be printed on one ballot, which was to be marked in secret. Described as a “blanket ballot,” the layout promoted an objective, consistent, and nonpartisan format. Candidates’ names were listed by office, alphabetically, with party affiliation discretely listed to the side. Inevitably, individual states began adopting variations, organizing names by party in columns with a pictorial emblem, making it possible to again vote a straight ticket. Party positioning on the blanket ballot layout became an issue. Wisconsin did it alphabetically, while Delaware and Oklahoma decided that Democrats should always be listed before Republicans. Some states ordered parties based on the number of votes in the last election; others rotated the order with each election cycle; minor parties were arranged at the discretion of the election officials or sometimes by the typesetter. New rules had to be made to figure out how to list candidates who represented multiple parties, candidates who coincidentally had the same name, or candidates who died before election day—not to mention how to correct any errors or make any other fixes that were needed after printing.

Sketch for emblem ballot layout, 1904.

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Official areas for write-ins, a concession to independent voting, were provided on the new ballots in multiple ways. Instead of being forced to cram a handwritten name on any available space, voters were provided with blank lines, labeled in various ways. New Jersey called it “Personal Choice,” Connecticut called it “No nomination,” and Mississippi stipulated they were to be used only in case of a candidate’s death. Delaware forbade the write-in, declaring it would void one’s vote. Kentucky allowed it but oddly removed the blank lines in 1938.36 In a brochure from the 1890s amply titled Memoranda of Defects in the Australian Ballot System of Voting, As Shown in Its Practical Operation in Various States, Compiled from Clippings Cut During the Last Four Years Almost Exclusively from the New-York Tribune, an Earnest Supporter of the System, extracts from newspaper articles describe responses to the new ballot format that read like haikus of electoral ills: VERMONT (1892)—Many electors refuse to vote.—Great number of ballots

thrown out.—Voters crowded out by slow marking.—Call for repeal of law. PENNSYLVANIA (c. 1890) —Nomination papers filed too late.—Ballots too large to

be printed in time.—Not enough paper in the county.—Ballots for whole state claimed to be illegal through mistake of officials.—Candidate died after ballot was printed. —No remedy. CALIFORNIA (1896)—Complexity and size of ballot embarasses officials. ARKANSAS (1896)—Despairing voter: “I don’t know how to vote this ballot but

I want to vote the straight Republican ticket—Fix it up yourselves.”

Given the number of offices and candidates in a given election, the form of the ballot could approach absurd lengths. One ballot for New York City’s democratic primary is a whopping fourteen feet long and lists nearly six hundred names (When I unfurled this scroll at the New York Public Library rare book collection, it caused quite a stir. I needed a bigger table.) Ballot reformers led by civic activist and publicist Richard Childs proposed “short ballots” to simplify the decision-making process: The multiplicity of elective offices disables democracy. It gives the people a sword too clumsy to wield and thus makes them harmless to their foes....It is not that politicians are corrupt, but that the obscure complexity of our politics constitutes a shelter that is attractive to corrupt men. The proper cure is a Short Ballot—a ballot so simple that the average man will know all about every candidate. Don’t hope for a change in human nature. Don’t try to get all good citizens to “go into politics” but simplify politics so that the good citizen can see the situation from afar.37

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Party ballots typically listed candidates’ names, offices, and locality. The enforcement of ballot regulations curtailed any expressive motifs on the blanket ballots, but a sample from Oregon in 1904 includes terse lines of additional text alongside the candidates’ names and party affiliations. These short statements served as an opportunity for propaganda (“For the people and the interests of a greater Portland” or “A farmer. Send one.”) Other states enacted provisions that were more pointed: in 1937, Oklahoma required “any candidate who is other than of the White race shall have his race designated upon the ballots in parenthesis after his name.”38 In Minnesota, nicknames are permitted (except in the case of Shelvie “Pro-life” Rettmann, a 1984 primary candidate for US Representative who, it turns out, didn’t really go by that name). Other candidates have petitioned to be listed as “Carol Moseley Braun,” “Cesar Chavez,” or, simply, “human.” All were rejected.

 

PERFECT MACHINES

The voting machine does require an act of faith on the part of the voter in a mechanical contrivance whose workings he cannot see.39 T. DAVID ZUKERMAN, 192 5

The Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw significant reforms to government and politics, as well as industrial innovations that transformed the electoral landscape. Inventions like the telephone, the lightbulb, the steam engine, and the automobile promised a brave new world of improved productivity and efficiency. The turn of the century also saw the professionalization of fields like political science, statistics, economics, and civil service, leading to a more systematic analysis of voting demographics and electoral administration. By 1872, a physical ballot was required in all states (except Kentucky, still sticking with the viva voce system). The paper ballot was targeted as a primary reason for persistent fraud: dishonest counting, inadvertent mistakes in marking that invalidated votes, and slowness in reporting results were conditions that would ostensibly be eradicated by machines. The 1890s saw a rush of patent proposals for different types of automated counting machines: dropping balls, pushing buttons, flipping levers, inserting keys, perforating devices, and sliding plates were all suggested as ways to register your vote without paper. As states considered switching systems, regulatory language was modified to declare “any type of machine would be allowed ‘provided secrecy be preserved.’”40

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Patent drawing for Dobbins Voting Machine, 1894.

Expensive, tremendously heavy, and difficult to maintain, the machines were prone to frequent breakdowns due to complex internal mechanisms that often required a perfectly level floor to function. Insufficient numbers of machines caused congestion at the polls and mandated a time limit for each voter. And, as with any lucrative state commission, fraud and bribery related to voting machine contracts were not uncommon, casting doubt on yet another voting process that had once been hailed as a means of purifying the polls. Despite glowing testimonials from state employees, reviews of the ballotless machines were mixed. Electoral historian Joseph Harris observed, “It is significant that the machines have never been able to succeed if the voter is given his preference between voting on the machine and voting a paper ballot.” 41 Flawed as they were, the machines gained widespread use, and by 1928, one in six voters would use a machine to vote in the presidential election. Voters today may wonder why we can’t just vote online, like we do with any internet poll. But while digital voting is intrinsically flexible (offering unlimited space,

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multiple languages, handicapped accessibility), it is also inherently hackable. Legal debate continues over what defines a ballot today: Is it the user interface? Is it the paper receipt? The question becomes quite existential. As of 2019, even after multiple elections have produced disputed results that were physically unverifiable, five states (Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Delaware) still rely on paperless electronic voting machines.

 

A SUPERABUNDANT FORCE

Our ability to participate in government, to elect our leaders and to improve our lives, is contingent upon our ability to access the ballot. We know in our heart of hearts that voting is a sacred right—the fount from which all other rights flow.42 STACEY ABRAMS, 2 018

The bulk of this book features the printed ballot; with the entrance of the voting machine and paperless ballots, the visual artifacts directly reflect that dramatic change. And while the more contemporary versions may be less graphically outrageous, that is also the point. The parade of ballots, starting with humble monochromatic letterpress and progressing through deliriously ornamental multicolored carnivals to staid and ordered blanket ballots, then shifting to lever-oriented layouts, is a timeline of form unto itself. But the recurring through line is not only how partisan operatives try to game the system but also how the physical ballot can directly reflect efforts at electoral control. Election tickets are the material embodiment of democracy. Issues of voter intent, security, and the integrity of the ballot are still paramount, just as they were when citizens put colorful tickets in a ballot box, pulled levers in a booth, or tried to punch a chad. Despite the past and present flaws in our system to elect our leaders, it feels appropriate to give the last word to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1831 observation captures the complicated miracle that is democracy: Democracy does not give the people the most skillful government, but it produces what the ablest governments are frequently unable to create: namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it and which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.43

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After using the voice voting method until the 1800s, the majority of states enacted legislation declaring that “all manners of voting should be by ballot.”1 Early ballots were written by hand, printed using letterpress, or a combination of both.

Toleration Ticket, Connecticut, 1818. This early ballot has the party list printed multiple times on one sheet to save paper. The individual tickets would have been trimmed and distributed to voters.

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Whig Ticket, Massachusetts, 1817. Early ballots were printed using letterpress, usually in one color. Voters would submit the entire party list rather than individual selections. This ticket employed enthusiastic punctuation.

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Election tickets, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, ca. late 1820s. Voters often wrote their candidate preferences by hand. One ballot from Rhode Island was submitted and signed by “Ruth Paine his wife.”

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“Chain the Beast, head and feet,” Boston, 1822. Referendum to change the official name from the “Town of Boston” to the “City of Boston.” BOTTOM Ballot for the Property Qualification for Colored Men, Clinton County, New York, ca. 1846. TOP

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Working-Men’s Ticket, Connecticut, ca. 1833. The Workingmen’s Party was the first labororiented political organization in the United States. This ballot depicts the opposing parties with curious appendages.

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Individual ballots, ca. 1860. Printed front and back on small slips of paper, these tickets would have been given to the voter in a bundle to submit separately in different boxes.

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Folded ballots, ca. 1830. These diminutive folded slips were bundled neatly with string. OPPOSITE Election notice, ca. 1871. Brooklyn readers were requested to cut off the ticket and submit it as their vote. BELOW

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Tally sheet, 1846. As the population grew and suffrage expanded, there needed to be more systematic efforts to identify voters at the polling stations. Generating and maintaining the rolls was a tedious task. Names were written in longhand before the adoption of the typewriter in the mid-1880s.

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Improving the integrity of the open voting system inspired initiatives like this government-issued envelope. This example from 1864 includes the Union Party credo and extols the virtues of President Lincoln on the reverse.

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The emblems used vary from state to state. The Democratic party uses a rooster in the act of crowing in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia; an eagle in New Mexico; the Statue of Liberty in Missouri; a plough in Delaware; a star in New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island; and a hand holding the American flag in Michigan.... The Prohibition party uses a camel in Missouri, a fountain in several states, and the sun rising over a body of water in Indiana.2 JOSEPH HARRIS, ELECTION ADMINISTRATOR , 193 4

Democratic Ticket, New Hampshire, 1863; Democratic National Reform Ticket, Maryland, 1876; Free Soil Ticket, Boston, 1849. Consistent political iconography was still being established during this period. Parties were represented by a range of emblems like this ship, sassy rooster and Dr. Seuss–like tree. LEFT TO RIGHT

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Ballots printed in German and typeset in blackletter, Ohio, 1864. OPPOSITE Democratic State Ticket, Ohio, ca. 1850. This buck giving the side eye was the Democratic party emblem. BELOW

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Regular Democratic TIcket, Massachusetts, ca. 1870s; Labor Ticket, Boston, ca. 1877; Democratic National Reform Tickets, ca. 1870. Motifs were consistent by party, but the look varied depending on the printer, who would select from different engraving catalog illustrations. One ballot includes the motto “Be Just & Fear Not.” LEFT TO RIGHT

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Regular Democratic Tickets, ca. 1867. Regular Republican Tickets, 1867–68. These ballots use the same illustration for mayoral and gubernatorial races. BELOW

OPPOSITE

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Temperance tickets, Boston, ca. 1876. One warns: “Out of the grogshops come misery, woe, poverty and death.” On the other, voters were asked to “scratch the name of any man on the ballot that you do not think sound.”

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A necessarily short and very incomplete overview of early political parties in the United States: First were the FEDERALISTS (Hamilton! Strong central government! Central bank!) and their opponents, the DEMOCRATREPUBLICANS (Jefferson! States’ rights!). The WHIGS were formed by the Democrat-Republicans in opposition to Andrew Jackson; the DEMOCRATIC PARTY formed in opposition to the Whigs; the NORTHERN and SOUTHERN wings of the Democratic Party formed in opposition to each other over slavery. Then there were the FREE SOILERS (no slavery in western territories), the PEOPLE’S PARTY (laborers and farmers), and the SOUTHERN REPUBLICANS , who were divided into the BLACK-AND-TANS (African Americans and liberal whites) and the LILY WHITES (self-explanatory). The KNOW-NOTHINGS specifically opposed Catholics and foreigners; the WORKINGMEN’S PARTY in California focused its ire on the Chinese; the BARNBURNERS hated slavery, the HUNKERS didn’t; there were the COPPERHEADS , the HALF-BREEDS , the STALWARTS , the GREENBACKS , the LOCOFOCOS ...It wasn’t just the ballots that were colorful back then.

Democratic and Liberal Republican Ticket, Boston, 1872. In the presidential race against Ulysses Grant, candidate Horace Greeley was supported by what would be a rare combination of party platforms today.

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Party tickets, ca. 1870s and ’80s. Ballot headers were interpreted by individual printers and showcased a wide variety of typographic styles.

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Party tickets, ca. 1870s and ’80s, showcasing some impressive mustaches.

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Regular Democratic Ticket and Regular Citizens Independent Ticket, California, ca. late 1890s. These ballot headers show explicit visual metaphors of the newly introduced Australian ballot system and its effect on the often corrupt politics of the party bosses.

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Regular Anti-Chinese Tickets, San Francisco, ca. 1876. President of the Anti-Coolie club Dr. C. C. O’Donnell ran on an anti-Chinese platform that promised to deport all Chinese immigrants within twenty-four hours of his taking office. One ballot features lettering reminiscent of the typeface Chopsticks.

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Regular Democratic Tickets and Regular Workingmen’s Tickets, California, ca. 1880s. Parties touted anti-Chinese platforms, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first federal law barring a specific ethnicity from immigrating to America.

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Printing ballots on colored paper stock made them more distinctive at the polls and demonstrated to party watchers that their money was well spent. The addition of colored ink produced a more striking look and also served to thwart counterfeiting attempts by opposing parties.

Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1871. This dog-eared ballot shows a lively combination of red ink on yellow paper stock.

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Labor Reform Ticket, Massachusetts, 1869; two colors of the Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1872; Independent Greenback Ticket, presidential electors, Massachusetts, 1878. LEFT TO RIGHT

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Regular Repulican Reform Ticket, ca. 1870s. OPPOSITE Gubernatorial ballot, North Carolina, 1876. This ganged page shows candidate Zebulon Baird Vance’s name typeset in a range of fonts. This sheet would have been trimmed and distributed as individual tickets. BELOW

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Ballot modifications were not discouraged by political parties and were so habitual that small strips of gummed paper called “pasters” would be sent to voters or handed out at the polls. Glue pots were provided at polling stations so voters could literally stick alternative candidates’ names on top of the printed ones. One observer wrote, “The degree to which pasters are used in a given election is a measure either of the badness of the lists of candidates issued by the parties, or of the independence of the voters, or of both phenomena together.” 3

Campaign letter, paster slips, and envelope, New York, 1865. Paster slips would be distributed to voters in advance of election day. This letter solicited the suffrage of voters for the office of prothonotary, a chief legal clerk.

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Marked ballots from 1888 and 1879. These examples show a combination of “pasters” and markings called “scratches” used to indicate an independent preference by physically defacing or manipulating the printed ballot.

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Regular Democratic Ticket, Massachusetts, 1872. OPPOSITE Citizens Ticket, Massachusetts, 1876. Ballot layouts became more eleborate as a reflection of the period style but also served as an attempt to foil pasting efforts with serpentine typesetting. BELOW

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The mid- and late nineteenth century was a period of heavy experimentation in the printing world. Wood type, metal type, and lithography were often combined, creating unusual, contortive typographic layouts that were not easy to execute smoothly. As one printer of the era succinctly described it, “Type is rectangular, and curves do not agree with it.”4

Regular Union Republican and Tax Payers Ticket, 1870. This ballot has a surprising twist at the bottom.

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Union Ticket, California, 1867. Ticket for presidential electors, 1884. This curvilinear composition would not have been easy to achieve and likely used curved forms for the names. BELOW

OPPOSITE

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Election notice, ca. 1880s.

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Democratic Liberal Ticket, 1876. Prohibition Ticket, Boston, 1873. These typographically expressive ballots were produced using a combination of lithography and metal type. LEFT

RIGHT

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Republican Ticket, 1865. RIGHT Union Republican Ticket, 1867. The artwork for the names of candidates Alexander H. Bullock and William Claflin was recycled over several races. LEFT

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Regular Democratic Ticket, 1856. Regular Democratic Ticket, 1884. Detailed hand-drawn ornamentation adorns these highly embellished ballots. The Buchanan ticket instructed voters: “Write your Name on the back of the Ticket” to verify their identity. BELOW

OPPOSITE

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South Division ballot for Democratic presidential electors, 1864. This dense yet precise lithographic ballot is an impressive display of hand-drawn type.

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The middle of the nineteenth century saw a convergence of technical innovations that allowed paper to be manufactured at an industrial scale, as well as chemical developments in ink making that produced new, brighter, and more stable pigments.

Presidential elector ticket, Virginia, 1860. This elegant ticket shows fine engraved details.

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Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1868; Regular Democratic Ticket, Massachusetts, 1876; Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1869 and 1871. LEFT TO RIGHT

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Regular Democratic Ticket, California, 1868. Regular Republican Ticket, California, 1870. OPPOSITE Regular Republican Ticket, California, 1871. These ballots used circular borders as a motif, with one party slogan declaring “No Negro or Chinese Suffrage.” TOP

BOTTOM

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Union Republican Ticket, California, 1868.OPPOSITE Regular Union Democratic Nominations, California, 1867. BELOW

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Union Ticket, California, 1864. National Democratic Nominations, California, ca. 1880. BELOW

OPPOSITE

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Election scrapbook with pasted ballots in multiple layers, ca. 1860s.

People’s Tickets, California, 1865. Single-color printing was often used to great advantage to create unique typographic compositions. BELOW AND OPPOSITE

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Union Republican Ticket, California, 1871. The back features a cartoon of rival gubernatorial candidates Newton Booth and Henry Haight, with Lady Liberty saying, “Bad boy Henry... I’ll try Newton this time.” OPPOSITE People’s Reform Ticket, California, 1859. BELOW

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Printing in black, Printing in white, Printing in colors, Of sombre or bright. Printing of pamphlets, Or bigger books, too; In fact there are few things But what we can do. Printing done quickly, Bold, stylish, or neat, At Printing-office, Street! 5 SAMPLE ADVERTISING SLOGANS FOR PRINTER S, 18 7 1

Union Republican Ticket, Boston, 1864. This ticket shows poorly registered two-color printing where the color plate alignment is off.

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Union Republican Ticket, California, 1871. An unusual example of three-color printing. BELOW Regular Democratic Tickets, California, 1864. These two ballots show inking differences and different registers within the same print run. OPPOSITE

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Examples of a two-color, two-sided ballot from Ohio, 1864. RIGHT Independent Taxpayers Union Tickets, California, 1871. Multicolor print with hand lettering in two colorways. One uses yellow as a second color. BELOW

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Regular Democratic Tickets, California, ca. 1870. Two different color combinations for different ward elections. Both use hand-set metal type on a variety of quirky curves.

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Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1878. Unusually precise examples of multicolor printing using a chromatic press. Text is letterpress printed in different colors in one pass.

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The backs of ballots were often more colorful and outlandish than the business side. With room for party slogans, currency-like engravings, and sometimes satirical political cartoons, the versos alone are a colorful romp through the artistic printing styles of the period.

Administration Union Ticket, Sacramento, California, 1851. The inks on this three-color, double-sided ballot retain a vibrant hue. The artist’s signature is on the back.

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Union Republican Ticket, Mississippi, 1868. This Civil War ballot shows handwritten edits replacing printed names in favor of Southern Democratic candidates. The replacement of “For” with “Against” the Constitution is a clear form of protest against the Lincoln administration. OPPOSITE Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, ca. 1874. BELOW

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Ballot backs, ca. 1868. The backs of ballots were an opportunity for further expression, and these samples are akin to currency security engravings. One ballot depicts the sinking of the CSS Alabama, a Civil War naval battle.

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Ballot backs. T OP Regular Democratic Ticket, Massachusetts, 1879. BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT Regular Republican Tickets, Massachusetts, 1868 and 1870. OPPOSITE Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1876.

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Ballot back, Regular Democratic Reform Ticket, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, 1876.

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Ballot backs. LEFT Regular Republican Ticket, California, ca. 1871. RIGHT Republican and People’s Reform Ticket, California, 1856. This back references John Frémont, the first presidential candidate of the Republican Party. An explorer and soldier who led multiple surveying expeditions into the American West, he was known as the “Pathfinder.”

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Ballot backs. T OP Regular Republican Ticket, Boston, 1877. M IDDLE Regular Democratic Ticket, Massachusetts, 1877. BOTTOM Regular Republican Ticket, Boston, 1867.

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The cardinal features of the [Australian] system are two: first, an arrangement for polling by which compulsory secrecy of voting is secured; second, an official ballot containing the names of all candidates, printed and distributed under state or municipal authority. Either of these may, on principle, exist without the other, although the second is almost indispensable as a part of the machinery for the perfect working of the first. Each requirement, however, has an efficiency of its own, and each operates against a special class of evils.6 JOHN WIGMORE, JURIST, 18 8 9

Republican City Committee flyer, New York, 1897. The adoption of the Australian ballot system was a radical shift in voting practices. This flyer explains to voters how to identify the party emblem and mark a straight ticket.

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Sample ballot, Sangamon County, Illinois, 1900. This huge ballot uses a blanket layout, with all names arranged in party columns and listed by office.

Sample Republican primary ballot, Oregon, 1912. Printed on striking rust-colored stock, this ballot allowed candidates to add a personalized slogan next to their name, such as the one for W. S. Hufford: “Equal justice and courteous treatment for all.”

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Sample electors’ ballot, Massachusetts, 1904, organized by office with typographic ornaments.

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Americans made modifications to the Australian format by adding columns that allowed voters to choose a straight party ticket. This 1906 ballot from Pennsylvania shows names grouped by office with a straight party option.

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Sample ballot, Norwich, Connecticut, 1910, using a party column layout. BELOW Sample ballot, Louisiana, 1904, with a densely typeset list of proposed amendments below the candidates’ names. OPPOSITE

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New York State ballot, 1895. “The use of emblems is an insult to the intelligence of the voter,” a critic wrote. “It puts him in the ridiculous position of voting for birds, elephants, stars, etc...There can be no improvement in government as long as voters cast their ballots for birds instead of men.” 6

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Twenty-Seventh Assembly District ballot, New York, 1914. Tiny emblems were used to aid voters in party recognition; dual-party affiliations made for some crowded layouts, and empty space was occupied by typographic filler.

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Sample ballot, Ninth Assembly District, New York, 1888, using geometric forms and Cartesian coordinates to represent candidates’ multiple party affiliations. OPPOSITE Municipal ballot, Sangerfield, New York, 1894, showing a variety of wee emblems for each party, including an all-seeing eye and a beehive. BELOW

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Democratic primary election ballot, New York, 1902. This ballot measures fourteen feet long and contains nearly six hundred names organized by state and district committees. The impossible length speaks not only of bureaucratic deficiencies but also a clear disregard for the citizen trying to cast his vote.

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Excerpt from a 1913 Progressive Party booklet analyzing legal mark making. BELOW Back of New York primary ballot, 1926. Before the Australian ballot system was adopted, there were no official state ballots. OPPOSITE

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This specimen book from 1930 shows the catalog of matrices available to Linotype compositors for composing ballots. This selection includes a lever for ballots used in gear-and-lever voting machines, which began to replace paper ballots in the early twentieth century. The adoption of mechanized voting technology saw the demise of freewheeling ballot designs and a new age of the compliant, graphically torpid ballots we see today.

Democratic primary ephemera, Pennsylvania, 1918. Directions instruct voters: “Take this with you to the polls.” OPPOSITE Bilingual specimen ballot, Republican Party of Hawaii, 1936. BELOW

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Sample ballot, Republican Party, Philadelphia, 1956. TOP Official Federal War Ballot for servicemen, 1944. BOTTOM Specimen ballot, Democratic primary, Philadelphia, 1960. OPPOSITE

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The 1960s saw a transition from gear-andlever machines to punch cards. The Votomatic punch-card system was introduced in 1965 and was active for another forty years. Voters used a stylus to press through an underlying card with perforations, theoretically creating a clean mark that would be indisputable.

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Democratic primary ballot, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, 1968, listing all candidates with photos. BELOW Democratic primary ballot, Missouri, 1972. This short-lived ballot shows Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew from the race after only eighteeen days as George McGovern’s running mate. LEFT

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Sample ballot, Pennsylvania, 1972. This voting machine sample ballot contains options for “personal choice.”

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Sample general election ballot, Florida, 2000. These infamous “butterfly” ballots caused confusion among voters in Palm Beach County. Mismarked and spoiled ballots forced a recount.

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Ranked-choice ballot, Maine, 2018. Voters were instructed to rank candidates in order to determine the majority preference.

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NEW ANXIETIES AND OLD FRIENDS

Victoria Bassetti

On election day, November 2018, millions of New York City voters showed up at the polls only to be confronted with an almost-three-foot-long, two-sided ballot with print so small it strained the eyes. To cast their vote, they had to fill it out front and back, tear it in half along a perforated line, and then carefully feed both pages into a scanner. The two pieces of paper increased time at the scanner, which increased average voting time, which resulted in hour-long lines snaking around buildings. Plus, paper jams mushroomed. Then the rain started. People came into the polls dripping wet. Some of the paper ballots started getting damp, which meant even more paper jams. The city’s election system turned into a waterlogged, snarled mess. Voter frustration, already high during a tense election season, surged. Fifteen hundred miles to the southwest, in Texas, some people using paper-free electronic voting machines began seeing strange things on the screens: their votes were changing. They had selected one slate of candidates only to see the machine then flip and record a different vote. They weren’t, as some suggested, imagining it. The Texas secretary of state acknowledged the startling error. Betraying barely a hint of concern, he placed blame on the voters themselves, some of whom were pushing two buttons at once or not waiting long enough for the page to load. The glitchy machines were used in 30 percent of the state’s polling stations, potentially affecting more than five million voters.1 Even in twenty-first-century America, with all its might and technical sophistication, the most prosaic things—a little rain or computer lag times—can throw an election into disarray. In many ways, a successful election in America is a minor miracle. Any system that sends millions of people to hundreds of thousands of makeshift venues and then hands them pieces of paper to fill out or screens to tap—all on one day—is bound to have its fair share of hiccups, glitches, and malfunctions like the ones

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in New York and Texas. And so the American way of voting generates almost endless fodder for a favorite national pastime: griping about elections. But voter grumbling is not inconsequential. The cumulative impact of one frustrated and angry voter after another can be a devastating drop in trust in our democracy. Indeed, a legitimacy crisis looms over our elections systems today. From 2000 to 2012, public confidence that the vote in a national presidential election would be accurately counted dropped from 50 percent to a bare 20 percent—and that was before the 2016 presidential election featuring Russian efforts to hack state voting systems.2 What happens when people no longer have faith in the foundation stone of our democracy? More than one hundred years ago, as the Progressive Era dawned, a crisis of confidence led to a series of major reforms aimed at injecting a measure of integrity into elections. By the 1920s the last vestiges of nineteenth-century voting had been cast aside, and the American way of voting had been completely transformed. The act of voting and ballots that were once part of a communal spectacle, nurtured by the parties and often primed by alcohol and money, now belonged to the bureaucrats. The humble paper ballot—the once exuberant expression of American democracy in action—gave way to a plethora of voting devices: the pull lever, the punch card, the touch screen, the paper-ballot scanner, and the hand-counted paper ballot. Today, the creative, colorful chaos of the nineteenth-century ticket is gone, replaced by ballots printed in prosaic black in a regulated font on carefully specified white paper, cut along precise dimensions. Or people vote by pressing on a flexible layer of polythene as pixels arrange themselves into candidates’ names on glowing screens. In a word: boring. The Progressive movement’s search for order had consequences, good and bad. One immediately obvious one: voter participation plummeted. In 1876, before the reform movement took hold, eligible voter turnout hit a whopping 82.6 percent. No surprise, then, that ballots from that election feature so heavily in this book. They are the survivors of a robust, lively democratic culture. But from 1892 to 1920, participation in presidential elections tumbled by 30 percent. By 1892 the Australian ballot had been adopted in thirty-two of forty-four states.3 That year, three-quarters of eligible voters showed up to cast ballots in the presidential contest among four men. Grover Cleveland—whose complaint about White House food, “I must go to dinner, but I wish it was to eat a pickled herring a Swiss cheese and a chop at Louis’s instead of the French stuff I shall find,” has resonance to anyone who has been forced to eat at a political banquet—won with a plurality of 46 percent of votes cast; the three other candidates, from the Republican, Populist, and Prohibition parties, split the remaining votes. By 1920, less than half of America’s franchise holders even showed up

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to vote. They sent one of the least-qualified candidates ever, Warren G. Harding, to the White House.4 Ample evidence demonstrates that the way we vote significantly impacts whether we vote and for whom we vote. The Progressive restructuring of our elections systems directly contributed to the decline in political participation. America has never again reached the participatory highs of the nineteenth century. Of course, the drop in voter turnout is due to more than just a change in the way ballots are printed and distributed. Some of the deterioration can be attributed to reduced fraud. But the academic consensus is that fraud reduction has accounted for only a small portion of the voter falloff. More important, from 1890 to 1920, voter registration rules were significantly tightened, campaign spending was dramatically limited, and nonpartisan elections began to flourish. In much of the country, Jim Crow laws or anti-immigrant efforts, including literacy tests, suppressed voters.5 Meanwhile, the integral role of the parties in American civic identity began to fade, not just because of how elections changed but also because of the rise of new, rival forms of engagement. An explosion of mass entertainment— vaudeville, pulp magazines, radio, movies—outcompeted the political parties to draw people’s enthusiasm. The captivating energy of the ballot and elections dissipated.6 Still, the history of the post-Progressive election system is as fascinating as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century voting was, even though the surrounding material culture is far less appealing. Meanwhile, twenty-first-century voting technology has not cured many of the problems that were apparent in the nineteenth century. Confusion, fraud, intimidation, incompetence, limited choice, bribery, cheating, penny pinching, and amateurism are all still features of American voting. Despite the profound dip in participation and the persistence of voting system abuses, Americans had a powerful sense of confidence in the administration of elections in the twentieth century. During World War II, America’s democratic system was a point of pride. With more than eleven million Americans scattered to the ends of the world, it might have been natural to make shipping materiel to them a high priority. But America’s democratic might was on display worldwide; so with the 1944 presidential election approaching, the federal government established the War Ballot Commission and printed millions of war ballots. According to the New York Times that year, as many as 4.4 million war ballots were cast by service personnel.7 America was satisfied with the way it voted. For years after the nation switched to either the Australian ballot or the lever machine, the study and regulation of voting technology was a sleepy backwater. There were, of course, the inevitable scandals. Fraud and cheating persisted. In 1948, for example, one ballot box from a small town in Texas produced conveniently last-minute

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results giving senatorial candidate Lyndon Baines Johnson an eighty-seven-vote lead over his opponent, with the names of the last 202 voters to cast their ballots recorded alphabetically in identical handwriting. Or lever machines could break down in certain neighborhoods, as they did at a suspiciously high rate in African American wards in Philadelphia during its 1978 mayoral election. Disenfranchisement and discrimination via ballot and machine design also continued. At the beginning of the twentieth century, some states that allowed limited women’s suffrage began using voting booths with separate entrances for the sexes. Some lever voting machines admitted men and women equally, but the voting administrator threw a switch to change the ballot presented to the voters based on their gender.8 In Louisiana the legislature enacted a law in 1960 that required the ballot to designate the race of the candidates. The law stood until 1964, when the US Supreme Court struck it down.9 Throughout the Southwest and in parts of New York City, election administrators effectively disenfranchised Latino voters by using English-only ballots. In response, Congress passed a 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that mandated multilingual ballots where a substantial population spoke a language other English.10 Ironically, the Australian ballot introduced all-new ways to vex or confuse the voter as local election officials and county clerks were thrust into the design business. They were not naturals at it. In each of the 2008 and 2010 elections, poor ballot design likely resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost votes, according to several Brennan Center for Justice studies.11 The local election administrator’s layout job is not made any easier by having to cope with occasionally byzantine state regulations governing ballots. For example, in California, a candidate’s designation—that is, the description of the person, such as lawyer—is governed by a confusing provision that dictates font size, capitalization, and cross references to two other statutory provisions. Not all design laws introduce confusion, though. Amazingly, all New York ballots to this day maintain a whimsical vestige of nineteenth-century ballot design. By law, each ballot must “have printed upon it in black ink...at the head of the column...containing the names of candidates, the image of a closed fist with index finger extended pointing to the party”—a little surviving bit of printer’s craft. A printed fist on a ballot is one thing. A law that induces chaotic ballot design is another. In Virginia, a statute that barred listing party affiliation for some races but required it in others led to such awkward results that in 1976, Democratic and Republican candidates from Fairfax County joined hands to sue the state’s election board; the 1976 Republican candidate for Congress was listed in a way that suggested he was running as a US Labor Party contestant, and independent candidates appeared to be running as Republicans.12

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By and large, these sorts of problems were only ever of local interest. Until 2000. In the long days following that general election, when the system failed to produce a president, Americans slowly came to discover a dirty little secret: in many places, the system was rickety, error prone, and sloppy. People learned of the election administrator’s prayer: “Please don’t let it be close. Please make it a landslide.” In Florida, it was close, and when people started examining the process, the results were not pretty. All those mechanisms—the lever machines, the punch-card systems, the paper scanners—suffered from a constellation of maladies with mundane names: High residual vote. Poor ballot design. Poor tabulation systems. Florida’s election system showed evidence of all of them. “Residual vote” refers to “the difference between the number of voters appearing on election day and the number of ballots actually counted in a given race.”13 A high residual vote is like a fever—evidence that something is wrong. In Palm Beach County, Florida, ground zero in the 2000 election wars, the residual vote was 6.4 percent, about four times the state average. It was a sure sign of an acute problem with that county’s voting system, an issue that quite likely changed the outcome of a presidential election. What really captured the media’s attention in Florida, however, were the “butterfly” ballot and the hanging chad. Palm Beach’s butterfly ballot shot to the top of the list for worst ballot design in American history. Then Americans were introduced to chads and the complicated world of determining voter intent by examining them. A chad is the rice-grain-size bit of paper produced when a voter pushes a hole through a punch card. Ideally, the chad detaches completely from the card. When that happens and a hole is clean, voter intent is easy to determine. But in 2000, Florida voters produced a veritable extravaganza of chads: hanging chads, pregnant chads, dimpled chads, tri-chads, swinging-door chads, and pierced chads. These chads? Well, they were indications of some form of voter intent, but what exactly? As thousands of voting officials, lawyers, and protesters gathered in Florida to observe the examination of the chads, the nation realized its voting tabulation system was maybe not as good as advertised. Florida was in the headlines, but the state was not alone, nor was it the worst example. A group of Caltech and MIT academics who systematically evaluated the data found an even higher spoiled or uncounted ballot rate in Illinois, South Carolina, and Georgia. In some counties the residual vote rate was as high as 20 percent. All told, they estimated that nationwide 1.5 million presidential votes and 2.5 million gubernatorial or senate votes went uncounted because of machine problems.14 Congress responded and enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. The law was grounded in a classic American triad: faith in technology, faith in datadriven decision making, and faith in the power of throwing a lot of money at a problem. HAVA, among other things, authorized an infusion of more than $3 billion for states to

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upgrade their voting systems. Much as the Progressives cast off party-printed ballots, HAVA threw aside lever and punch-card voting machines after post-2000 evaluations showed that those machines suffered from unjustifiably high residual vote rates. Plus, there were those chads. In practice, most states used the money to shift to either direct-recording electronic (DRE) systems (better known as “touch screen”) or paper ballots that were counted by hand or scanner. There were almost immediate improvements. In 2000 the national residual vote rate was about 2 percent for the presidential election. By 2008, it dropped to 0.8 percent.15 HAVA spurred many jurisdictions to use touch-screen technology. Although it was not new—the first machines had been used in the 1970s—post-2000, it found favor with many elections administrators. Yet, many of the machines deployed were untested, poorly designed, or insecure. Worse yet, most of them were virtually unauditable. Each individual vote amounted to nothing more than a fleeting press of the finger on a screen recorded on a memory circuit. With no paper trail, there was no way to double-check results. By 2016 about 27.5 million voters, many of them in perennial battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida, cast their ballots on such machines.16 By 2016 HAVA, for all of its imperfections, had significantly transformed the way America voted. Voting machines had been upgraded, and a powerful new set of data tools had been brought to bear on the system. Not only was the system far more efficient but also fraud and errors were much easier to spot. There were, to be sure, looming challenges. Ballot design was a perennial sore spot. Many of the machines bought in the wake of 2000 were aging. Others, like the paper trail–free DREs, were not quite up to snuff. And federal money to help states upgrade their systems had dried up. A special commission appointed by President Obama after the 2012 election warned of an “impending crisis in voting technology.”17 Then the Russian disruption campaign began. The doubts and distrust triggered by the 2000 election turned into a full-blown panic attack after 2016. Our voting system, which often seems to pull off an election on a wing and a prayer, was woefully underprepared to counter a well-funded, concerted foreign government cyberattack. America’s voting administration is remarkably decentralized; up to ten thousand separate administration jurisdictions run our elections. A county clerk in Indianapolis or Los Altos is hardly equipped to detect, much less defend against, sophisticated hackers. In 2016, the Russian government probed the election systems in all fifty states. Even as Russian hackers were noisily leaking emails stolen from top Democrats and manipulating social media for maximum public disruption, they were quietly and

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carefully reconnoitering the US voting system for vulnerabilities. They made only limited inroads. In Florida, two county voting systems and one software vendor were breached by hackers from the G.R.U. Russian military intelligence unit. While the details are not public, the hackers apparently gained access to voter registration systems, though they did not alter them. In Illinois, the personal information of more than two hundred thousand voters was perused by Russian operatives. “Russia would have had the ability to potentially manipulate some of that data,” one federal Department of Homeland Security official told reporters. With “the level of access that they gained, they almost certainly could have done more. Why they didn’t...is sort of an open-ended question.”18 As for the vote-tallying systems themselves? Nationwide, they apparently remained free from intrusion.19 No evidence emerged that any votes were changed.20 But people were shaken, and the fear remains that 2016 was just a reconnaissance mission. Future incursions could be far more aggressive and far more damaging. Once again, as it had in the wake of the 2000 election, Congress responded, in part. In 2018 it allocated $380 million to the states to improve their voting systems. More money was promised in 2019. Among the upgrades was a surprise solution to the foreign threat: paper ballots. After all, paper ballots can’t be altered by Russian hackers. Although the $380 million was only a drop in the bucket, the new program required states to ditch paperless touch screens and use paper if they wanted the money for equipment. The process of replacing old machines is expensive and takes time, and at the time of this writing a host of other laws relating to election security are percolating in Congress. As the 2020 election approaches, experts have warned that we are still unprepared and that billions more will be needed to ensure ballot security. America has entered a new era of anxiety about its voting and democracy. Yet, oddly, an old friend has returned to help salve that anxiety. After more than one hundred years of experimentation with lever machines, punch cards, and touch screens, voting has come full circle. The humble paper ballot is back.

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15 Joel Munsell, Chronology of the Origin and Process of

NOTES

Paper and Paper-Making (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1876), 12. 16 Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION OF DEMOCRACY

(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 2:72–73.

1

17 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of

Dana Canedy, “The Palm Beach Ballot,” New York

Times, November 9, 2000.

Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years, 1690–1940

2 Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude

(New York: Macmillan, 1942), 169.

Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth

18 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London:

Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),

Macmillan, 1888), 107.

75.

19 New York State Legislature, Documents of the Assembly

3 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

of the State of New York, Eightieth Session, 1857, 3:2.

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 344.

20 McCormick, 161. 21 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1945), 1: 261. 22 Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy, Journey of Life: Reminiscences

THE MOST FUGITIVE EPHEMERA 1

and Recollections (New York: Advance Thought, 1890), 1:141.

Philip Loring Allen, “Ballot Laws and Their Workings,”

23 Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1913, 15.

Political Science Quarterly 21 (March 1906): 58. 2

“Old Time Ballots,” Hobbies, September 1940, 12–14.

3

J. S. Wise, The End of an Era (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,

24 William Frye, “The Safety of the Republic Lies in the Purity of the Ballot,” speech to the House of Representatives, April 23, 1879.

1899), 55–56. 4

25 Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen

Petition, Cumberland, New Jersey, inhabitants,

(New York: Martin P. Brown, 1878), 133–34.

November 7, 1786, Assembly Minutes Papers, Box 5, New

26 Memoranda of Defects in the Australian Ballot System

Jersey Senate Journal, cited in Richard McCormick, The

of Voting, Compiled from Clippings Cut During the Last Four

History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of

Years Almost Exclusively from the “New-York Tribune,” an

Election Machinery, 1664–1911 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

Earnest Supporter of the System, 1895, Albert S. Bard Papers,

University Press, 1953), 80. 5

Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public

Francis Parkman, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,”

Library, 3.

North American Review 127, no. 263 (1878): 5. 6

27 New York Sun, editorial, May 12, 1889, cited in Eldon

Albert McKinley, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen

Cobb Evans, History of the Australian Ballot System

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1 74

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A L I C I A Y I N C H E N G is a graphic designer and founding partner at MGMT. design. She has worked as a senior designer for Method, New York, and was the co–design director at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She has taught and served as a visiting critic at Yale University, Princeton University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Parsons School of Design, University of the Arts, the Cooper Union School of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Alicia received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Yale University. This Is What Democracy Looked Like is her first book. V I C T O R I A BA S S E T T I is a fellow of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She is the author of Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters (New Press), the companion book to a PBS documentary by the same name. Bassetti worked on Capitol Hill for almost a decade and served as chief counsel to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and legislative director for former Senator John Edwards (D-NC). She was a chief counsel and staff director of a subcommittee at the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she served on the teams that drafted the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, the PATRIOT Act, the Economic Espionage Act, and the Homeland Security Act. In addition, she was a part of the legal working group assigned to oversee the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 2000. J U L I A N E . Z E L I Z E R is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He recently published Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (W. W. Norton), coauthored with Kevin M. Kruse, and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press). His latest book is Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Press).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book came into being by virtue of generosity. It was the generosity of the talented people at MGMT. design, who allowed me to keep running off to various libraries; the generosity of my family; and the generosity of all the librarians, archivists, and collections managers who gave their time and assistance. This project would not be possible without the support of the New York Public Library research study rooms and staff, especially Melanie Locay, Kyle Triplett, and Meredith Mann. Special thanks to Lauren Hewes and Vince Golden at the American Antiquarian Society; Claire Jerry, Debra Hashim and Kay Peterson, and Shira Goldstein at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History; Jordan Goffin at the Providence Public Library; Lisa Caprino and the librarians at the Huntington Library; Pat Boulous at the Boston Athenæum; and Frances Evans at the California Historical Society. Thanks to early listeners who provided crucial feedback: Tomas Mellins, Jonathan Spaulding, T. Kevin Sayama, Becky Laughner, and Florence Grant; Larry Norden of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law; Dan Wood and Lois Harada at DWRI Letterpress; Frank Romano of the Museum of Printing; and Nicholas Blechman at the New Yorker, who gave me a classy online debut. Bethany Johns provided stalwart support, and Barbara Glauber reminded me about my eyeballs. Abby Bussel, Sara Stemen, Paul Wagner, and Valerie Kamen at Princeton Architectural Press helped bring this book into the world, and Victoria Bassetti was my missing electoral link and ballot buddy. Above all, I am grateful to Michael Rubens, Minya Rubens, and Sarah Gephart for their unflagging support, patience, and encouragement.

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