On the morning of November 2, 1859—Election Day—George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city’s Fifteenth Ward, which was heavily dominated by the American Party, a ruffian tried to snatch his ballots. Kyle dodged and wheeled, and heard a cry: his brother, just behind him, had been struck. Next, someone clobbered Kyle, who drew a knife, but didn’t have a chance to use it. “I felt a pistol put to my head,” he said. Grazed by a bullet, he fell. When he rose, he drew his own pistol, hidden in his pocket. He spied his brother lying in the street. Someone else fired a shot, hitting Kyle in the arm. A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party’s Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings into the election, whose result Harrison contested, Davis’s victory was upheld on the ground that any “man of ordinary courage” could have made his way to the polls.

The founders didn’t anticipate that voting would be done in secret. Illustration by Arnold Roth

Voting in America, it’s fair to say, used to be different. “Are you not a man in the full vigor of manhood and strength?” a member of the House Committee on Elections asked another Harrison supporter who, like Kyle, went to the polls but turned back without voting (and who happened to stand six feet and weigh more than two hundred pounds). The hearings established a precedent. “To vacate an election,” an election-law textbook subsequently advised, “it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness.”

What was at stake, in the House Committee on Elections, was whether men like George Kyle were too easily daunted. What wasn’t at stake was that Kyle, an ordinary voter, carried with him to the polls a bundle of ballots. Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. Kyle, like everyone else, brought his own. The ballots he carried, preprinted “party tickets,” endorsed the slate of Democratic candidates, headed by Harrison. Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge. This was no mean feat, and not only in Baltimore. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, eighty-nine Americans were killed at the polls during Election Day riots.

The reform that ended this unsettling state of affairs was imported from Australia, and was not achieved in the United States until the eighteen-nineties. The American adoption of the “Australian ballot”—and the radical idea that governments should provide ballots—was hard fought. It lies, if long forgotten, behind every argument about how we ought to vote now, from the 2002 Help America Vote Act’s promotion of paperless voting to the more recent backlash, favoring a paper trail. And it is also, like every other American election reform, a patch upon a patch.

The United States was founded as an experiment in eighteenth-century republicanism, in which it was understood that only men with property would vote, and publicly, since they were the only people who could be trusted to vote with the commonweal, and not private gain, in mind. What went on in 1859 was something altogether different: voting was still public, but all white men could vote, and nearly seventy per cent of them managed to do so in the congressional elections that year, pistols and fisticuffs notwithstanding. From an eighteenth-century point of view, how we vote now looks even stranger. Casting a ballot remains the defining act of American citizenship. But, especially since the election of 2000, with its precariously hanging chad, many people worry that voting in America is a shambles and even a sham, that the machinery of our democracy is broken, crippled by confusing, illegible, and deceptive ballots; vote-counting devices either rickety and outdated or new, gimmicky, and untested but, in any case, unreliable and by no means tamperproof; and a near total absence of national standards and federal oversight. In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

Americans used to vote with their voices—viva voce—or with their hands or with their feet. Yea or nay. Raise your hand. All in favor of Jones, stand on this side of the town common; if you support Smith, line up over there. In the colonies, as in the mother country, casting a vote rarely required paper and pen. The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballotta, or little ball, and a ballot often was a ball, or at least something ballish, like a pea or a pebble, or, not uncommonly, a bullet. Colonial Pennsylvanians commonly voted by tossing beans into a hat. Paper voting wasn’t meant to conceal anyone’s vote; it was just easier than counting beans. Our forebears considered casting a “secret ballot” cowardly, underhanded, and despicable; as one South Carolinian put it, voting secretly would “destroy that noble generous openness that is characteristick of an Englishman.”

In 1634, the governor of Massachusetts was elected “by papers” for the first time; thirteen years later, a Bay Colony law dictated voting “by wrighting the names of the persons Elected.” But, outside learned, literate New England, this would have been entirely impractical. Only very slowly did voting by paper grow common enough that the word “ballot” came to mean not a ball but a piece of paper. Well after American independence, elections remained widely the stuff of corn and beans and hands and feet.

The Constitution, drafted in 1787, left the conduct of elections up to the states: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Further than this limited federal oversight the framers would not go. And even this needed James Madison’s insistence, during the Constitutional Convention, that “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that states might make of unimpeded power over the conduct of elections.

With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will. (The original proposal, at the Constitutional Convention, was for the President to be elected by Congress, called, in the debates, the “national legislature.” A motion “to strike out ‘National Legislature’ & insert ‘citizens of U.S.’ ” was defeated, with only Franklin’s Pennsylvania dissenting. It was all but inconceivable that the people, even given limited suffrage, would elect the President directly. The election of the President by Congress, however, violated the separation of powers. The Electoral College, proposed after the defeat of the motion for direct election, was an illbegotten compromise.)

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The states, left to their own devices, adopted electoral methods best described as higgledy-piggledy, except that everyone agreed that Election Day ought to be a public holiday, involving plenty of stumping, debating, and parading. Some of the original state constitutions make mention of voting by ballot; some don’t. The framers of New York’s 1777 constitution, wondering whether “voting at elections by ballot would tend more to preserve the liberty and equal freedom of the people than voting viva voce,” proposed a “fair experiment” with paper. In 1802, Ohio required voting by ballot in “all elections.” By no means, however, did paper voting become universal. The citizens of Kentucky voted viva voce until 1891.

Early paper voting was, to say the least, a hassle. You had to bring your own ballot, a scrap of paper. You had to (a) remember and (b) know how to spell the name of every candidate and office. If “John Jones” was standing for election, and you wrote “Jon Jones,” your vote could be thrown out. (If you doubt how difficult this is, try it. I disenfranchise myself at “Comptroller.”) Shrewd partisans began bringing prewritten ballots to the polls, and handing them out with a coin or two. Doling out cash—the money came to be called “soap”—wasn’t illegal; it was getting out the vote.

The eighteenth century’s experiment in republicanism gradually gave way to the unruly exuberance of nineteenth-century democracy. New states entering the union adopted constitutions without any property qualifications for voting, putting pressure on older states to eliminate those restrictions. As suffrage expanded—by the time Andrew Jackson was elected President, in 1828, nearly all white men could vote—scrap voting had become a travesty, not least because the newest members of the electorate, poor men and immigrants, were the least likely to know how to write.

Political parties, whose rise to power was made possible by the rise of the paper ballot, stepped in. Party leaders began to print ballots, often in newspapers: either long strips, listing an entire slate, or pages meant to be cut in pieces, one for each candidate. At first, this looked to be illegal. In 1829, a Boston man named David Henshaw tried to cast as his ballot a sheet of paper on which were printed the names of fifty-five candidates. Election officials refused to accept it. Henshaw sued, arguing that he had been disenfranchised. When the case was heard before the state’s Supreme Court, the decision turned on whether casting a printed ballot violated a clause in the state’s 1780 constitution, requiring a written one. “It probably did not occur to the framers of the constitution,” the Court observed, in a landmark ruling in Henshaw’s favor, “that many of the towns might become so populous as to make it convenient to use printed votes.” The Massachusetts constitution, only fifty years old, had already been outpaced by the times.

Printed ballots came to be called “party tickets,” because they looked like train tickets (which is why, when we talk about someone who votes a single-party slate, we say that he “votes the party ticket”). The printing on ballots of a party symbol, like the Free Soilers’ man-pushing-a-plow, meant that voters didn’t need to know how to write, or even to read. Not surprisingly, the ticket system consolidated the power of the major parties. Curiously, it promoted insurgency, too: party malcontents could “bolt,” or print their own ballots, listing an alternate slate of candidates; they could “knife” a candidate by stacking up a pile of tickets and slicing out his name; and they could distribute “pasters,” strips of paper printed with the name of a candidate not on the party ticket, to be pasted over that of his opponent. (For this, polls were stocked with vats of paste.)

Undeniably, party tickets led to massive fraud and intimidation. A candidate had to pay party leaders a hefty sum to put his name on the ballot and to cover the costs of printing tickets, buying votes, and hiring thugs, called “shoulder-strikers,” to tussle with voters. To make sure all that soap was paying off, ballots grew bigger, and more colorful, so bright-colored that even “vest-pocket voters”—men who went to the polls with their ballots crammed into their pockets—could barely hide their votes.

But wanting to hide those votes began to seem eminently reasonable to reformers both in the United States and in Britain, where suffrage had also been expanding. In 1830, the Scottish Benthamite James Mill argued for a secret ballot in order to curb the influence of landlords upon their tenants and factory owners upon their workers. The next year, Maine required that all ballots be printed on the same color paper, to protect voters trying to cast minority ballots in a polling place besieged by rowdy members of the majority. It didn’t do much good. What honest man was ashamed of his vote? The secret ballot, the Virginian John Randolph insisted, “would make any nation a nation of scoundrels, if it did not find them so.” In 1851, a Massachusetts legislature dominated by Free Soilers and Democrats mandated the use of envelopes, to be supplied by the Secretary of State. That didn’t do much good, either. “To say that the citizen shall vote with a sealed bag, or not at all,” critics argued, “is an act of despotism.” In 1853, when the Massachusetts legislature changed hands, the new majority made envelopes optional, having accepted the argument that it was its duty to give every citizen the right “to vote as his fathers did, with an open ballot.” By the time the House Committee on Elections investigated the contested 1859 Baltimore congressional election, jostling and brawling at the polls were to be expected and endured. (Women were not enfranchised until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920, although, as suffragettes argued, maybe if women had been allowed to vote earlier, Election Day would have been marked by more decorum.) “Were the voters of the 11th ward men of ordinary courage?” a committee member asked a Baltimorean who had only this honest answer: “Men of ordinary courage, extraordinary courage, and some with no courage at all.”