How Did Voting Get So Corrupt?
Always & Never.
One of the things people say when a change is proposed is “We’ve always done it this way” or its brother objection “We’ve never done it that way.” Both of those words, always and never, are the biggest lies in the English language. Nothing is ‘always’ and few things are ‘never’, but if we do something regularly, it quickly becomes the way we’ve always done it. My favorite example of this is the Christmas tree. Indoor Christmas trees were not a thing outside of Germany until 1840. That year Queen Victoria married a German, Prince Albert, and he began the tradition of a British royal Christmas tree. Christmas trees became all the rage and just five years later people wrote in their diaries, “We put up the Christmas tree like we always do,” even though the tradition was barely five years old.[1] Just because it feels like something has always been around, doesn’t mean that it has.
Public Voting
Which brings me to my main topic – voting. Everyone knows there are major problems with voting in national elections here in the United States. Many solutions have been proposed to solve these problems. Each has been met with resistance. Mostly, the objections boil down to “We’ve always done it this way.” Well, like most uses of the word always, that one isn’t true.
Today I am going to talk about the last big change to voting in the US – the introduction of the secret ballot. It seems weird to us, but voting used to be extremely public. In 1789 when the Constitution went into effect and the United States as we know if came into existence, voting was public. It was seen as a civic duty and a public trust, so the community had a right to know how you voted on a particular issue or candidate. That worked fine for a while. Then two things happened that had far-reaching effects on our entire civilization – the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War. These two separate events gave rise to the same problem – voting corruption.
Industrial Revolution corruption
Let’s start with the Industrial Revolution. You may have heard about Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the United States as being a nation of yeoman farmers. ‘Yeoman farmer’ being pompous rich dude speak for small farmer. Well, the US was never that. Not even in Jefferson’s time. However, in the early days of the country, most people did work for themselves either as farmers, craftsmen or merchants. A wage laborer had the lowest social status. The only people beneath them were beggars, slaves and single women. That’s a joke. Women weren’t considered part of the social structure at all, but that discussion is for another day. Because they were largely economically independent, voters were left to vote as they saw fit. Their neighbors or friends might debate topics or candidates with them, but there is no record of coercion.
The Industrial revolution changed that. Suddenly the average voter was dependent upon his employer for his very survival. Thanks to unfair, but legal practices like black-listing, your boss could fire you and then prevent you from getting another job. These industrial bosses often worked hand in hand with political party leaders, usually called political bosses or party bosses. Together they were just The Bosses. And the bosses knew how you voted. Not only was voting public, but political parties ran the whole show. The government didn’t print ballots – political parties did. They printed ballots on distinctively colored paper with their preferred candidates listed. Unless you crossed off a candidate’s name or wrote one in, you voted for all the names listed on that party’s ballot.
Even today if a person votes for all the candidates in one political party, that person voted a “straight ticket”. A person who votes for candidates from two or more different parties, that person “split” their ticket.
Because the ballots were on different colored paper, everybody knew at a glance how everyone else voted. Party bosses and employers usually had men stationed at the polling place to keep track of who voted for the ‘correct’ party. This gave rise to all kinds of abuses. Sometimes employers told their workers, that if so-and-so wins he will ruin the economy. “If that happens,” the boss would say sadly, “I’ll have to lay a lot of you off.”
Translation – “If you want to keep your job, you better vote for my guy.” Other tactics were much harsher and included threats, vandalism and violence. The results were the predictable – greedy, power-hungry men ran the government. They lined their own pockets, funneled public funds to their allies and neglected public needs. Eventually people realized that the system was not working anymore. It took a decade or two, but eventually the general public was outraged enough to demand change.
That is the Industrial Revolution’s part of the problem. Let’s put a pin in that and flip over to the aftermath of the Civil War to examine the other contributor to voting corruption – the Jim Crow South.
Civil War Fallout
In order understand to voting corruption in the Jim Crow South, we need to rewind our timeline to 1877. After the Civil War the rebellious Confederate states were under a kind of martial law called Reconstruction until that year.
We tend to think that racially based voter suppression in the South sprang into being the moment Reconstruction ended in 1877. The truth is it developed overtime. Case in point, the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized segregation wasn’t handed down until 1893. In fact, Black people voted and held political office frequently in the post-Civil War/pre-Jim Crow South. For example, comedian Chris Rock’s ancestor served in the state legislature in 1872. Until the presidential election of 1876 and the stalemate that followed, the South had been lurching toward a more equal society. So, what happened? The election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877. That presidential election was the closest in American history and radicals on both sides were threatening violence if their guy was declared the winner. Political party leaders solved the problem with the Compromise of 1877.
Republican Hayes would get the White House, and white Southerners would get political control back in their hands. So, imagine that you are a white former slave holder in 1877 with political power back in your hands and your federal babysitters finally gone. How do you get all those former slaves out of government and back in their proper place – beneath your bootheel? Answer – you scare them to death.
Public voting allowed Southern leaders to know how the former slaves voted and their retribution for ‘wrong’ voting made the punishments by the Northern bosses look like slaps on the wrist. Even Southern white men who supported the rights of the Black people, could not vote their conscious for fear that they would suffer the same punishments as Black men. I must point out that racially motivated voter intimidation was not confined to the South. It happened in northern communities, too. The primary difference was that it was institutionalized and blatant in the South. Whether that was better or worse than the covert and hypocritical methods used in the North is hard to say. In the end, corrupt voting practices led to the same results in both regions – greedy, power-hungry men ran the government and lined their own pockets at the expense of the public good.
By the end of the 19th century (1800s), the problem was well understood and citizens in every state were demanding solutions. One popular solution to this problem was switching to a secret ballot system. In my next blog post, I’ll detail the secret ballot system that all states eventually adopted and how the change was implemented in one state – Illinois.
[1] Source – “Christmas Unwrapped” History channel documentary.