The Whites of their Eyes (14 page)

The first recorded colonial use of paper voting comes from Mass
achusetts: in 1629, church members in Salem elected their pastor by writing his name down on slivers of parchment. In 1634, John Winthrop, the colony’s first governor, was elected “by paper”; thirteen years later, a Bay Colony law dictated voting “by wrighting the names of the persons Elected.”
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The federal Constitution of 1787 left the conduct of elections up to the states: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Furthe
r than this limited federal oversight the framers would not go. And even this needed Madison’s insistence, during the Constitutional Convention, that “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that states might make of unimpeded power over the conduct of elections.
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And, of course, in establishing the federal government, the Constitution made a compromise on the fundamental question about suffrage that had started the Revolution in the first place: taxation without representation. How were the people to be represented? Should the states, big and small, have equal representation in Congress, or should they
be represented according to their size? Madison argued that the states were divided “not by their difference of size . . . but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.” Over this question, South Carolina threatened to walk out, one of its delegates declaring, “You must give each state an equal suffrage, or our business is at an end.” At a dinner meeting at his house, Benjamin Franklin proposed what became known as the Connecticut Compromise. In the Senate, states would have equal representation; in the lower house, representation would be proportionate
to population, one representative for every forty thousand free people; slaves would count as three-fifths of a person. Only the lower house would have the power to tax. The three-fifths clause held the country together, by perpetuating an institution many delegates to the convention despised. Its consequences were horrible to contemplate. “What will be said of founding a Right to govern freemen on a power derived from slaves”? was the question posed by John Dickinson. Gouverneur Morris stated it squarely: “The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to thi
s: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.” At the end of the convention, George Washington went home to Virginia and began laying a plan to manumit his slaves.
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In the Constitution written in Philadelphia, taxation, representation, and slavery were entirely tangled together.
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Voting, itself, was left to the states. The Constitution makes no
provision for how Americans should vote, not only because the men who wrote it wanted to leave such matters (mostly) to the states but also because, as only Madison glimpsed, they could not possibly have foreseen how unwieldy elections would very soon become. With the exception of Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the men who met in Philadelphia could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase, tenfold, by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage, wh
ich entirely defied eighteenth-century political philosophy. The popular will had to be restrained, sifted, as if through a sieve. The framers expected only a tiny minority of Americans to vote. And these men wouldn’t elect the president directly; they would vote only for electors of the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.
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The states, left to their own, adopted electoral methods best described as higgledy-piggledy. Five of the original thirteen state constitutions made mention of voting by ballot.
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“An opinion hath long prevailed among diverse good people of this state,” wrote the framers of New York’s 1777 Constitution, “that voting at elections by ballot would tend more to preserve the liberty and freedom of the people than voting
viva voce
”; they proposed a “fair experiment” with the paper ballot.
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In 1799, Maryland became the first state to require paper voting in all statewide elections. The Twelfth
Amendment, ratified in 1804, mandated that members of the Electoral College “vote by ballot.” By no means, however, did paper voting become universal. The citizens of Kentucky voted
viva voce
until 1891.

Early paper voting was, to say the least, a hassle. You had to bring your own ballot, a scrap of paper. Then you had to
(a) remember and (b) know how to spell the names and titles of every candidate and office. If “John H. Jones” was standing for election and you wrote “John Jones,” your vote would be thrown out. (If you doubt how difficult this is, try it. I disenfranchise myself at “comptroller.”) Shrewd partisans began bringing prewritten ballots to the polls and handing them out . . . with a coin or two. Doling out cash—the money was called “soap”—wasn’t illegal; it was getting out the vote.

Meanwhile, the eighteenth-century’s brilliant experiment in republicanism gave way to the unruly exuberance of nineteenth-century democracy. New states entering the union adopted constitutions without any property qualifications for voting, putting pressure on older states to eliminate those restrictions. The electorate doubled and then tripled. And still it kept growing. As suffrage expanded—by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, nearly all white men could vote—scrap-voting had become more or less a travesty, not least because the newest members of the electorate,
poor men and immigrants, were the least likely to know how to write.
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In stepped political parties, whose rise to power was made possible by the rise of the paper ballot. Party leaders began to
print
ballots, usually in newspapers, either long strips, listing an entire slate, or pages meant to be cut to pieces, one for each candidate. These ballots came to be called “party tickets” because they looked like train tickets (and which is why, when we talk about someone who votes a single-party slate, we say that he “votes the party ticket”). The printing on ballots of party symbols (that’s where the elephant and the donkey come from) meant that voters not only didn’
t need to know how to write; they didn’t need to know how to read, either.
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At first, party tickets looked to be illegal. In 1829, a Boston man named David Henshaw tried to cast as his ballot
a sheet of paper on which were printed the names of fifty-five candidates, his party’s entire slate. Election officials refused to accept his ballot. Henshaw sued, arguing that he had been disenfranchised. When the case was heard before the state’s supreme court, the decision turned on whether casting a printed ballot violated a clause in the state’s constitution, requiring a written one. The Massachusetts Constitution, only decades old, had already been outpaced by the times. “It probably did not occur to the framers of the constitution,” the Court observed, in a landmark ruling
in Henshaw’s favor, “that many of the towns might become so populous as to make it convenient to use printed votes.”
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The ticket system made voting easier but only at the cost of limiting voters’ choices. It also consolidated the power of the major parties while, curiously, promoting insurgency, too: party malcontents could print their own ballots, promoting their own slate of candidates; “knife” a candidate by stacking up a pile of tickets and then slicing out someone’s name from the whole stack at once; or distribute “pasters,” strips of paper with the name of a candidate not on the party ticket, to be pasted over his opponent’s name. (Polls were stocked with vats of paste.)
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Party tickets led to
massive fraud, corruption, and intimidation. A candidate had to pay party leaders a hefty sum to ensure that his name would appear on the ticket and to cover the costs of printing tickets and buying votes. (One estimate put the midcentury price of a congressional seat in New York City at over $200,000.)
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Ballots grew bigger and more colorful, so brightly colored that there was no way a voter could hide his vote.

But wanting to hide that vote now began to seem, in some quarters, eminently reasonable.
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In 1851, the Massachusetts legislature mandated the use of uniform envelopes, to be supplied by the secretary of state. This proved controversial. “To
say that the citizen shall vote with a sealed bag, or not at all,” critics argued, “is an act of despotism.” What honest man was ashamed of his vote?
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In 1853, when the Massachusetts legislature changed hands, the new majority made envelopes optional, having accepted the argument that it was its duty to give every citizen the right “to vote as his fathers, did, with an open ballot.”
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, someone came up with a startling idea. What if the government were to provide not just envelopes but ballots, too? An election law passed in Australia in 1856 detailed, quite minutely, the conduct of elections, ordering that no campaigning could take place within a certain distance of the polls and requiring that election officials print ballots and erect a booth or hire rooms, to be divided into compartments where voters could mark those ballots secretly. In 1888, Massachusetts passed An Act to Provide for Printing and Distributing Ballot
s, the model for all that followed.
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Elsewhere, state legislatures swiftly adopted the same reform, persuaded, no doubt, of the need to clean up elections but also, in some places, eager to solve the “problem” of the expansion of the suffrage by . . . restricting it.

An Australian ballot, a ballot printed by the government, a ballot that voters had, even minimally, to
read
, made it much harder for immigrants, former slaves, and the uneducated poor to vote. (Women, of course, couldn’t vote until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920.) Some precincts formally imposed and selectively administered literacy tests; others resorted to ranker chicanery (in 1894, one Virginian congressional district printed its ballots in Gothic letters). In the South, where black men had been granted suffrage by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, it was fear of the
black, Republican majority that led many former Confederate states to adopt the reform in the first place. As a Democratic campaign song sung in Arkansas in 1893 put it:

The Australian ballot works like a charm

It makes them think and scratch

And when a Negro gets a ballot

He has certainly met his match.

The year after Arkansas passed its Australian ballot law, the percentage of black men who managed to vote dropped from 71 to 38.
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That wasn’t remedied until 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Times change. That’s why everyone can vote. And that’s why we’re not still voting with corn and beans.

At the Green Dragon Tavern, I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the Tea Party. He shrugged. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he said. “I don’t agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we’re not conducting purity tests. We’re building coalitions.” Patrick Humphries came by, handing out flyers about Tax Day. Humphries didn’t have much use for Palin, either. “She’s flamboyant. She’s matured a lot. She has the right mind-set, but she’s not our leader. We don’t need a leader. We’re all about devolution. We’re going back to the Constitu
tion. If she were running for president, would I vote for her? Eh.”

Humphries was born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa. “I have always been a conservative,” he told me, taking a seat. “I register Republican once a year, for the primaries, and then reregister as an Independent. I was not a supporter of McCain, who wasn’t a true conservative.” He went to his first Tea Party meeting in March 2009. “The radical change
that is going on has to be stopped. The losses of liberty are startling. I don’t think people understand the government takeover of the economy, but it will represent a loss of freedom.” Humphries and I kept talking past one another. He started talking about the Louisiana Purchase. I thought he meant Jefferson’s deal with Napoleon, in 1803. No, he meant the payoff of $300 million in federal money to the state of Louisiana to buy Democratic senator Mary Landrieu’s support for the health care plan.

Humphries didn’t vote for Barack Obama; he didn’t like what he was doing; he didn’t want to foot anyone else’s bills; he sent Scott Brown to Washington to stop all that, and Nancy Pelosi thwarted him. Humphries was concerned about his liberty. He handed me a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution, printed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, whose website refers to the Constitution as a “miracle” and also sells a biography series called “The Real Founding Fathers,” as endorsed by Glenn Beck. “I don’t think the Founding Fathers wanted lobbyists running around Washington,” Hump
hries said. He quoted the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Humphries felt both powerless and poorly represented and even disenfranchised; he wanted that power he was supposed to get from the Tenth Amendment. “The Constitution gave us a bedrock. Ours was meant to be a very simple, straightforward government. The more power and money that goes to Washington, the less that’s available to the states and to the people.”

The National Center for Constitutional Studies was started in Utah in 1967, to promote originalism, the idea that the original intent of the framers is knowable and fixed and the final
word. When the framers were still alive, people who wanted to know what they meant, by, say, a particular phrase, couldn’t really ask them. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention pledged themselves to secrecy. And the more time passed, the remoter the Revolution, the more inscrutable the documents (even the meaning of the
words
changed), the greater the distance between now and then, the more demanding the act of interpretation. In 1816, when Jefferson was seventy-three, many of his Revolutionary generation having already died, he offered this answer, when asked what the framers would suggest about how to deal with this problem. “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead”: “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” (To paraphrase the historian Carl Becker, the question the Enlightenment asked was not, “What would our forefathers do?” but “How can w
e make society better?”)
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Jefferson put it this way: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” In Federalist 14, Madison asked, “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own
situation, and the lessons of their own experience?”
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The founders were not prophets. Nor did they hope to be worshipped. They believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed is to become a slave to the tyranny of the past.