[EL] secret ballot

[Dan Johnson]

I wish poll workers (election judges in Illinois) were required to document
incidents when citizens ask whether they may vote but are turned away due
to registration or identification barriers imposed by the government. I
witness it every election cycle when i am working a precinct for my
candidates, but there is no data collection to systematically document it.

On Tuesday, December 27, 2011,  <JBoppjr at aol.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Dan Johnson

Attorney at Law
111 West Washington, Suite 1920
Chicago, Illinois 60602

312.867.5377 (office)
312.933.4890 (mobile)
312.794.7064 (fax)
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