The Australian Ballot versus voting rights - why didn't they warn us?
...by the way, the Australian Ballot is how America holds elections
Please be patient…this is an article about history, just like plenty of other articles here. It’s a history which helps account for how we got into a current bad situation, without being warned we were getting into that situation. But first for a little description of the bad situation, before describing part of the story of how we got into it.
In most states, the American voting system discriminates against, or sometimes altogether disenfranchises, voters who want to vote for third-party or independent candidates. There are significant obstacles to third parties and independents who want to get on the ballot, and without a candidate or party on the ballot, the voter better hope they live in a state with a write-in ballot, so they’ll at least have a chance to cast a a write-in vote - assuming they know about the write-in candidates and how to spell their names.
Indeed, the system in most states discriminates against, or disenfranchises, those who want to consider and reject third-party and independent candidates in favor of mainstream candidates. If you can’t vote for a candidate you can’t vote against him/her either, and this ought to bother even the opponents of the excluded candidate, unless they want the government instead of the voters making electoral choices.
I’m going to focus on one big obstacle to getting on the ballot - the signature requirements. Basically, if you didn’t get enough votes in the last election, or if you’re running for the first time, you need a certain number of petition signatures - often a lot of signatures - before your name or your party gets on the ballot. Strangely, the state laws are written so that the vote totals of the two major parties are always enough to avoid the onerous signature-gathering requirement. It’s challengers to the Big Two parties who have to go around soliciting signatures and enduring rigorous examination of such signatures as you manage to collect.
You can spend plenty of time looking up the gory details of this and other voting-rights violations here, if you want.
You may ask, how did this disenfranchisement get started? It came from new laws called Australian Ballot laws, and the people who ought to have warned about the disenfranchising potential of the new laws…often didn’t sound the alarm. Let’s see the background out of which this situation arose.
Until the late nineteenth century, voters brought their own ballots to the polls - in practice, this meant ballots printed up by their particular political party. The government didn’t decide who was on the ballot, they simply counted the votes on the different ballots.
But there’s always someone to ruin a good thing for everyone. In the chaos of the polling place, an observer might be able to see who someone were voting for - ballots weren’t standardized, and different parties’ ballots could be of different colors. So if you’d bribed a voter, you’d be able to watch him vote to make sure he voted like he was paid to do. And if a voter worked for you, you could hire your goons to watch him and make sure he votes correctly - if he wants to keep his job.
How to deal with this problem? Some reformers thought that greater security at the polling place might do the job. Give voters a place where they could cast their ballots privately, away from prying eyes.
But some reformers wanted to go even further. Borrowing an idea which started in Australia, they suggested that the government print up all the ballots. No private ballots, no different colors - a poll worker handed you a ballot and you marked it in a secluded polling spot, with no indication to snooping outsiders how you voted.
But there would be other advantages! Private ballots came prefilled by the party organization which gave it to you, so you’d be more likely to vote a straight ticket. With a government ballot, you could more easily split your ticket (assuming you could read it, but reformers didn’t always like illiterate voters anyway). And since the government paid the expenses of the ballots, then party officials wouldn’t be shaking down their candidates for contributions to make sure they weren’t “accidentally” left off their party’s ballot.
The big battle over the Australian ballot was in New York state. Upstate Republicans thought the Australian Ballot was just dandy, since it would cut into the Democratic bloc-voting by sometimes-illiterate New York City voters with their straight tickets. For the same reason, David Hill, who was the Democratic governor of New York from 1885 to 1891, opposed the Australian Ballot.
So when the Republican legislature passed an Australian Ballot bill, Governor Hill of course vetoed it. In his veto message, he used a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach to concoct every possible objection he could imagine against the bill.
So, surely, Hill mentioned that bills like this could have disenfranchised or at least discriminated agains, minor candidates and parties?
The bill would require 1,000 signatures for a non-major-party candidate to get on the official government ballot (less for local offices).
This was the cue for Hill to say that these new-fangled signature requirements could harm small parties and independent candidates.
Instead, Hill warned of problems in the other direction - with ballots getting printed by tax funding instead of privately, ballot access would be easier, Hill said, and that would be a Bad Thing.
It is not believed to be desirable, nor is it just to the taxpayers, that every political adventurer who desires to run for a public office should have his ballots printed at public expense, regardless of his merits, the extent of his following, or the motives or purposes of his candidacy. A mere handful of adherents, compared with the great body of the citizens, should not be permitted to impose a self-constituted candidate upon the people, at public expense, simply to gratify his personal vanity or the pretensions of a small faction.
Had Hill foreseen the actual effect of the Australian Ballot and its signature requirements, his mind would have been set at ease. The public-ballot system, more than its predecessor, has been able to weed out those whom the two-party duopoly deem to be “political adventurer[s],” favoring adventurers from the established parties instead.
Hill did offer useful reforms which could have kept the private-ballot system while protecting voters and the public against bribery and threats: more privacy and security at the polls, a ban on employers threatening political reprisals in employees’ pay envelopes, a day off from work so workers could vote…but the Republicans and their reformist allies had their views fixed on the Australian Ballot. Finally Hill agreed to a half-and-half compromise combining public with private ballots, but the details need not detain us, since as soon as Hill left the governorship the legislature passed a full-on Australian Ballot law, complete with signature requirements.
Now that we’ve seen an opponent of the Australian ballot system blow his chance to warn the people of its disenfranchising effects, let’s look at a pro-Australian-ballot reformer who didn’t think petition requirements would have to be onerous, and who predicted wonderful results from the easy ballot access he believed was in store for the public.
The reformer in question was John Henry Wigmore, the legal scholar who later became a famous authority on the law of evidence. In 1889, Wigmore published his monograph The Australian Ballot System. He wanted such a system for America, and looked at examples abroad and at home to give his comments on how the system worked.
Wigmore wanted to get past the method of having candidates nominated by “a caucus or a convention,” and instead he would have candidates go straight onto the ballot so the voters could vote on them:
To compress the issue roughly into a phrase, — what we need now is not merely free elections, but free nominations also , — not merely a sincere and accurate expression of opinion , but an opportunity to nominate and to vote effectively for any one whom we desire.
Could a better voting-rights sentiment be expressed?
Massachusetts had established a fifty-signature requirement to get on the ballot. Some had questioned this requirement as too strict, though Wigmore thought it wasn’t too bad. Still, he’d be willing to concede the point and reduce the number below fifty:
In determining the number of signatures necessary to be obtained in order to put a candidate in nomination, the single object is of course to place all on a practically equal footing, and to impose only such restrictions as are necessary to prevent the ballot from being encumbered with the names of unbalanced persons and men of straw. But even though (as in Massachusetts) a minimum of fifty be established, very few aspirants will be found who cannot muster a sufficient number of names; and the better way, since the number of signatures is practically no hindrance, is to place the required number as low even as in South Australia (two), and thus, while losing no benefit, avoid even that appearance of exclusiveness for which the Massachusetts law has sometimes been attacked. The real restrictions on the number of candidates will be found to be, as English and Australian experience shows, public opinion and the interests of the aspirants. The former will throw ridicule on a candidacy which has no support; and the latter will, as now, have a powerful deterrent influence wherever there is not some ground for the candidacy.
In England, Wigmore commented, only ten petition signatures were required, probably because of “the desire not to pledge or to make public the political action of a larger number of electors….It would seem to be better to require as few names as possible, - perhaps not more than ten, - thus losing nothing, and avoiding certain probable disadvantages.”
Here Wigmore raises an issue which is certainly becoming a problem nowadays, far more so than in the nineteenth century. Someone who signs an official candidate petition will find his/her name on a public record, subject to being plastered all over the Internet. If someone signs a petition for the “wrong” party or candidate, that could be the end of the signer, professionally and socially.
So we’ve seen how, when the Australian Ballot system was being imposed on the public, both a pragmatic politician (Hill) and a starry-eyed reformer (Wigmore) missed what for minor parties and candidates has proven to be the most characteristic feature of the system: political discrimination and disenfranchisement. We should be so lucky as to have the option of choosing among non-duopoly-approved “adventurers” (as Hill feared), and it would certainly be nice if we had “an opportunity to nominate and to vote effectively for any one whom we desire,” as Wigmore thought would be achieved with the Australian ballot.
Excellent description of the problem. Solution?