[EL] (no subject)

[Pildes, Rick]

John Lott's WSJ op-ed today about vote fraud contains a pretty misleading representation of his own work.

Lott says that before the secret ballot emerged in the late 19th century, "Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot."  Lott clearly says or implies here that vote buying fell about 8-12% with the rise of the secret ballot.

I was intrigued by this claim about the level of vote buying, since I hadn't seen this number presented before.  Academics know that the secret ballot did reduce turnout, but for a host of reasons.  Illiterate people, a significant share at the time, could no longer vote as easily as they could before the secret ballot.  Indeed, in the South, this was one of the reasons proponents for the secret ballot publicly gave:  that it would depress the black vote, given lower literacy rates (as Morgan Kousser's work demonstrates).

When the states took control of the ballot, by adopting the secret ballot, they also now had the power to regulate the ballot, a power states used to adopt measures like banning fusion candidacies, which had devastating effects on parties other than the Democrats and Republicans.  And the secret ballot certainly deterred some vote buying.  I was curious to see how Lott disentangled these effects to determine how much vote buying had taken place before the secret ballot.

So I went to look at the article.  My first clue that something was amiss was triggered by the title of the article, which is How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?  The article was not about vote buying and the secret ballot, but another subject altogether.  Nor, it turns out, does the article do any analysis at all of what led turnout to decline after the secret ballot -- how much vote buying versus these other effects contributed to that decline.  That's because the article isn't about that issue, even in part.  Indeed, Lott himself recognizes in the article that the secret ballot made it harder for illiterate citizens to vote:

"Adopting secret ballots prevented many illiterate citizens from  voting;
reading skills were required when voting no longer involved
simply taking a colored card that represented one's party preference
into the voting booth. Secret ballots also greatly hampered vote
buying, since it was much more difficult for those buying votes to
monitor which candidates a person voted for. The first column
illustrates how the secret ballot swept through the country, with 40
states adopting it between 1888 and 1896 (See Anderson and
Tollison (1990) and Heckelman (1995)).

But Lott's article doesn't take the next step of trying to disentangle these different effects or others we know played a role.  I don't blame him for that, that's not what the article was about.  But what Lott has done in his WSJ piece is simply take the raw decline in turnout after adoption of the secret ballot and magically attribute all of that decline to a reduction in vote buying - even though Lott himself knows better.

I am sure vote buying did diminish after the secret ballot, that was one of its purposes.  But Lott's work that he cites in his WSJ piece provides no basis at all for representing that 8-12% of votes were being bought before the secret ballot.  That is not of direct relevance to the argument in his op-ed, but when a writer plays this fast and loose, it doesn't help their general credibility.
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