{"id":4988,"date":"2008-10-21T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T08:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4988"},"modified":"2008-10-21T01:00:52","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T08:20:40","slug":"how-we-used-to-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4988","title":{"rendered":"How We Used To Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s New Yorker included a fabulously entertaining article<\/a> by Harvard historian Jill Lepore, describing the history of voting in the USA. Here’s just a small sample, but it’s worth it to read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

Americans used to vote with their voices\u2014viva voce\u2014or 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 \u201cballot\u201d 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\u2019t meant to conceal anyone\u2019s vote; it was just easier than counting beans. Our forebears considered casting a \u201csecret ballot\u201d cowardly, underhanded, and despicable; as one South Carolinian put it, voting secretly would \u201cdestroy that noble generous openness that is characteristick of an Englishman.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lepore also describes an “original intent vs. spirit of the Constitution” argument that in its outlines feels familiar today, even though the specifics have changed:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Supreme Court, the decision turned on whether casting a printed ballot violated a clause in the state\u2019s 1780 constitution, requiring a written one. \u201cIt probably did not occur to the framers of the constitution,\u201d the Court observed, in a landmark ruling in Henshaw\u2019s favor, \u201cthat many of the towns might become so populous as to make it convenient to use printed votes.\u201d The Massachusetts constitution, only fifty years old, had already been outpaced by the times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The big innovation — government<\/em> printing uniform ballots — was still years away at that point, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s New Yorker included a fabulously entertaining article by Harvard historian Jill Lepore, describing the history of voting in the USA. Here’s just a small sample, but it’s worth it to read the whole thing. Americans used to vote … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}