[EL] secret ballot

[George Korbel]

In Texas the ballot had a stub attached with a unique identical serial number  When we presented the registration we signed a roll with the same serial number   We were required to sign our name on the stub detach it from the ballot  and deposit it in a stub box. The ballot was placed in the ballot box. Each had wax seal.   The sheriff held the stub box after the election and the clerk the ballot box. These officials were often of like mind  in one texas county the sheriff and clerk were carrying on a torrid affair   

If there was an election contest the court and someone was found not qualified the court would   simply open the boxes identify the vote and remove it. 

David Richards and I challenged the process. We had a county judge, now passed away, who testified that he saw the boxes open and fraud taking place  If the sheriff was in a tight race one would just double vote sheriff on ballots cast for opponent.  We lost before a favorable three judge court. 

There was a prosecution of a Hispanic activist who testified before both house and Senate committees in 1975 on the expansion of the vra to include texas under the special provisions  of the act   When the ballot box was opened to remove his ballot, he found that his ballot had been altered. 

Obviously Hispanics and African Americans in our 200 smaller counties were intimidated. 

In one Larry McMurtry novel Molly's father who was a County Commissioner opened the boxes determined who voted against him and took back the corn whiskey he had given them as an inducement for their support. 

The legislature was so embarrassed by publicity on this practice it repealed the law. To embarrass the tx legislature is no small thing. 
 

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 26, 2011, at 4:23 PM, "J. Morgan Kousser" <kousser at hss.caltech.edu> wrote:

>   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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