History of the United States, Volume 5

by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

A stronghold of political corruption was assaulted from 1888 to 1894 by a hopeful measure known as the “Australian” ballot. It took various forms in different States yet its essence everywhere was the provision enabling every voter to prepare and fold his ballot in a stall by himself, with no one to dictate, molest, or observe. Massachusetts, also the city of Louisville, Ky., employed this system of voting so early as 1888. Next year ten States enacted similar laws. In 1890 four more followed, and in 1891 fourteen more. By 1898 thirty-nine States, all the members of the Union but six, had taken up “kangaroo voting,” as its foes dubbed it. Of these six States five were southern.

A New York Polling Place, showing booths on the left.

An official ballot replaced the privately—often dishonestly—prepared party ballots formerly hawked about each polling place by political workers. The new ballot was a “blanket,” bearing a list of all the candidates for each office to be filled. The arrangement of candidates’ names varied in different States. By one style of ticket it was easy for the illiterate or the straight-out party man to mark party candidates. Another made voting difficult for the ignorant, but a delight to the discriminating.

The new ballot, though certainly an improvement, failed to produce the full results expected of it. The connivance of election officials and corrupt voters often annulled its virtue by devices growing in variety and ingenuity as politicians became acquainted with the reform. Statutes and sometimes constitutions therefore went further, making the count of ballots public, ordering it carried out near the polling place, and allowing municipalities to insure a still more secret vote and an instantaneous, unerring tally by the use of voting machines.

In the North and West the tendency of the new fundamental laws was to widen the suffrage, rendering it, for males over twenty-one years of age, practically universal. Woman suffrage, especially on local and educational matters, spread more and more. Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah women voted upon exactly the same terms as men. In Idaho women sat in the legislature. There was much agitation for minority representation. Illinois set an example by the experiment of cumulative voting in the election of lower house members of the legislature.

Nearly everywhere at the South constitutional reform involved negro disfranchisement. The blacks were numerous, but their rule meant ruin. It was easy for the whites to keep them in check, as had been done for years, by bribery and threats, supplemented, when necessary, by flogging and the shotgun, But this gave to the rising generation of white men the worst possible sort of a political education. The system was too barbarous to continue. What meaning could free institutions have for young voters who had never in all their lives seen an election carried save by these vicious means! New constitutions which should legally eliminate most of the negro vote were the alternative.

In Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, proof of having paid taxes or poll-taxes was (as in some northern and western States) made an indispensable prerequisite to voting, either alone or as an alternative for an educational qualification. Virginia used this policy until 1882 and resumed it again in 1902, cutting off such as had not paid or had failed to preserve or bring to the polls their receipts. Many States surrounded registration and voting with complex enactments. An educational qualification, often very elastic, sometimes the voter’s alternative for a tax-receipt, was resorted to by Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Georgia in 1898 rejected such a device. Alabama hesitated, jealous lest illiterate whites should lose their votes. But, after the failure of one resolution for a convention, this State, too, upon the stipulation that the new constitution should disfranchise no white voter and that it should be submitted to the people for ratification, not promulgated directly by its authors as was done in South Carolina, Louisiana, and later in Virginia and Delaware, consented to a revision, which was ratified at the polls November, 1901, not escaping censure for its drastic thoroughness. Its distinctive feature was the “good character clause,” whereby an appointment board in each county registers “all voters under the present [previous] law” who are veterans or the lawful descendants of such, and “all who are of good character and understand the duties and obligations of citizenship.”

In the above line of constitution-framing, whose problem was to steer between the Scylla of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Charybdis of negro domination, viz., legally abridge the negro vote so as to insure Caucasian supremacy at the polls, Mississippi led. The “Mississippi plan,” originating, it is believed, in the brain of Senator James Z. George, had for its main features a registry tax and an educational qualification, all adjustable to practical exigencies. Each voter must pay a poll-tax of at least $2.00 and never to exceed $3.00, producing to the election overseers satisfactory evidence of having paid such poll and all other legal taxes. He must be registered “as provided by law” and “be able to read any section of the constitution of the State, to understand the same when read to him, or to give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” In municipal elections electors were required to have “such additional qualifications as might be prescribed by law.”

This constitution was attacked as not having been submitted to the people for ratification and as violating the Act of Congress readmitting Mississippi; but the State Supreme Court sustained it, and was confirmed in this by the United States Supreme Court in dealing with the similar Louisiana constitution.