[EL] secret ballot

[JBoppjr at aol.com]

A big lie repeated over and over again does not become true:
 
"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."
 
When put to the test, the Plaintiffs in Indiana could not come up with  one 
person who was disenfranchised.  No not one.  Jim  Bopp
 
 
In a message dated 12/26/2011 5:23:32 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
kousser at hss.caltech.edu writes:

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
phone 626-395-4080, fax 626-405-9841
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"

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