){kind=link}
Tickets & Ballots
The 2000 Presidential election led to intense scrutiny of voting technology and policies. But a flawed voting process was not unique to that election; it has been a perennial problem throughout this country’s history. Indeed, voting is such a crucial civic issue that it has been the subject of seven Constitutional amendments! Amendments 12, 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, and 26 have all attempted to regulate voting for American citizens.
During the early Republic, votes were often cast vocally, leading to widespread calls for the less public paper ballot. By the mid-nineteenth century, each party issued a ticket that listed only its own nominees. The names of the Presidential nominees headed the list, followed by the names of state electors. Citizens were directed to vote for one party’s entire slate of nominees, rather than for individual candidates. Voters could only “split” their tickets by making a special effort to cross out names from the list and write in alternate names, effectively creating their own tickets. Votes were thus not exactly secret, and coercion at the polls was common. Party bosses often tracked individual voters. In 1857, Australians began to issue paper ballots that listed all the candidates. The “Australian ballot” allowed citizens to vote for candidates from both parties, with a new level of privacy. New York became the first state in the Union to adopt the Australian-style ballot in 1889. In the 1890s, the mechanical voting machine was introduced, and it has since dominated voting systems. Today, however, the controversial punch card and various computerized voting systems have largely displaced the levered machine and its curtained booth. New technologies promise to improve voting by making it anonymous (and thus secret) and its tallies reliable.