The Birth of the Secret Ballot – Part Two

What can we do about all that corruption?

When we left our story, the American political system was awash in corruption. Party bosses grew rich on ‘contributions’ from rich robber barons and the robber barons, or to use the polite term, industrial capitalists were free to abuse their workers, maintain dangerous and toxic workplaces and sell the public poison disguised as food. The root cause of these problems lay in corruption at the polling place. The public nature of elections at that time led to vote buying, voter intimidation and elected officials who served their pocketbooks not the people. By 1888 citizens all over the country were fed up. They wanted solutions and they wanted them now. The most popular solution was to copy Australia’s voting practices. The center piece of that system was voting in absolute secrecy. This post will examine the details of the secret ballot, its growing popularity in the country and how one state implemented the change over from public voting to secret ballots.

The secret ballot had been used sporadically before the mid-1880s, but no one adopted it permanently until 1856. Australia was the first place to fully adopt the secret ballot AND they did it before they were even a country. Australia became a country in its own right on January 1, 1901. By then they had used secret ballots for more than 4 decades. Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria were the first colonies to adopt it, but by 1877 all of the mainland Australian colonies were using secret ballots.

There were four components to the Australian system:

1. All official ballots were printed at public expense.

2. The names of all qualifying candidates and all proposals were included on the ballot.

3. Ballots were only distributed at the polling place.

4. All ballots are marked in secret.

Fun Fact: When political parties printed the ballots, voters picked them up beforehand often at their favorite tavern.

Louisville, KY was the first US city to try the Australian ballot, and Massachusetts was the first to implement the system statewide. Both were huge successes and praised by all participants. William E. Russell, Democratic candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, said, “I do not think there has ever been in this State an election so quiet, orderly, and free from intimidation, corruption or any improper influence as we had last November under this new ballot law,”

Now I need to bring our focus to the microcosm. Specifically, to the state of Illinois. Why Illinois? Because I am an Illinois historian and Illinois’ adoption of the secret ballot is the one I know best.

I need to mention here that Illinois’ legislative session was only six months long and only held in odd numbered years. In 1889, the Illinois senate and the general assembly had bills changing to a secret ballot system on the floor. Unfortunately, none of the bills passed. The Tribune practically lit fireworks to celebrate the defeat. The paper was against any change to voting and that was that! But that autumn, local elections were held throughout the country. The Tribune’s party of choice, the Republican party, cruised to victory in every state but did especially well in states that had the secret ballot. Suddenly on December 18th, 1889, the Chicago Tribune announced that they supported Illinois adopting the Australian ballot. I wonder why they had a change of heart. Mmmm?

Snarkiness aside, one of the reasons the Tribune gave for not endorsing the ballot change earlier was that few states had held elections using the new system. After the 1890 midterm election, the Australian Ballot skyrocketed in popularity! The governors of Ohio and New Jersey endorsed it as did former President Cleveland. The Democratic party platform read “”We favor the adoption of the Australian ballot system so as to provide a fair and secret ballot.” The Republican platform said the same thing, but with a LOT more words. Smaller political parties like the Prohibition party and the Farmers Alliance eagerly supported the measure hoping it would help break the choke hold the major parties had on the political system. Reform groups and labor unions celebrated the measure. In Illinois nearly every candidate supported the state switching to an Australian style voting system.

When the state legislature began the next year, the ONLY thing everyone agreed on was that there should be a law passed implementing the new voting system. It still took them until June to actually pass the bill. I will not bore you with the details of the process. I LIKE politics and I found it tedious. The important thing is that the measure passed, and the new system was scheduled to debut at the 1892 election.

It was a huge success. Newspapers across the state praised it. Here is what the Alton Evening Telegraph said about the elections that year. “This has been the quietest election ever held in Alton. On all sides the working of the Australian ballot was praised. There were no noisy, half-drunken men around the polls trying to tell sober men how they should vote. Voters quietly received a ballot from the hands of a judge of election, retired to the booth, made out their ticket, folded it, returned it to the Judge, and quietly retired from the polling room, with none to interfere. … Everything was as quiet as Sunday.”

Secret balloting was on its way to sweep across the country. By the turn of the century voting in secret was the way we always did it. Voting was considered such a private matter that asking your neighbor how he voted was as rude as asking what color underwear they were wearing. It just wasn’t done.

So, why am I talking about this? Why should something that happened more than a hundred years ago matter at all today? Well, I can think of a lot of reasons why it’s important, but here is the point I’m making today. We can change the way we manage elections.

We haven’t always done it this way and we CAN change the parts of elections which are no longer working. We can change to publicly funded elections. We can make election day a national holiday. We can switch to mailed in ballots or, possibly, online voting. We can get rid of caucuses or even (gasp) the electoral college. We can even change to ranked choice voting (my own favorite reform). I am not advocating any specific change. I just want to show that we have changed elements of elections many times in our history and survived. The only thing the country might not survive is not making any changes at all