[EL] secret ballot

[J. Morgan Kousser]

   In relation to Mark Scarberry's post, we should also realize that in 
the U.S., the secret ballot was widely used, as the voter identification 
measures currently are, to disfranchise poor, uneducated people, 
especially African-Americans in the South.  By disfranchising 
African-Americans, it also greatly diminished the vote of the party to 
which they overwhelmingly adhered at the time, the Republicans, and 
partisan and racial purposes, then as now, could not be easily 
disentangled.  As the (Democratic) Little Rock Arkansas Gazette wrote 
after the first election (1892) in which the secret ballot was used in 
that state:

   The Australian ballot works like a charm:
   It makes them think and scratch.
   And when a negro [sic] gets a ballot,
   He has certainly met his match.

   That was two years after the longest Senate filibuster in history up 
to that time had defeated the second strongest voting rights act that 
Congress considered before 1965, the Lodge Fair Elections Bill.  (The 
strongest, in most respects, was the Enforcement Act of 1875, also 
defeated by a filibuster.)  If the Supreme Court were to strip voters of 
the protection of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case, 
a potential South Carolina voter id case, the Kinston or Alabama or 
Arizona or even Texas cases, then future election "reforms" might more 
overtly target their racial and partisan objects, as the secret ballot 
did more than a century ago.
Morgan

-- 
Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech
surface mail:  228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125-7700
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home page:<  http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html>
   . . . without the clarity that makes doubt productive, historians will never be able to fulfill their highest moral responsibility, to build a better world . . .
                       -- from "The New Postmodern Southern Political History"
   Perfection . . . in any institution is a dangerous myth; there is only the repeated correction of imperfections.  As long as there is discrimination, there will always be more work to do.
                        -- from "The Strange, Ironic Career of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act"