was disposable. So, it, there was no need to store them
between the elections. And it was very easy to just have on hand
enough in case you had unexpectedly high voter turnout.
The metal ballot box on the right is a different set of tradeoffs.
This is probably more secure than a wooden one for, for multiple reasons but
including that. It has a metal tab at the top through
which you can attach a padlock. And they could use arbitrarily strong
locks, different locks in each election. It presented another opportunity for
security enhancement. In addition to the design of the ballot
box, the design of the ballots themselves was something that had a, a, a great
number of security features as well as opportunities for mischief.
Candidates quickly realized that it was easier for the voter if they could bring a
ballot that had the candidate's name already on it, printed in advance.
And so to show you this example this is one of the earliest examples of a
pre-printed ballot. We see at the top here, the candidate who
paid to have these ballots printed has his name already written in there.
But there are slots for all the other offices for the voter to, to write in his
choices or her choices with a pen. Now this particular ballot you can see is
torn on the left and the bottom. It was probably printed in a newspaper as
an advertisement. A, a little free reminder of, of who you
wanted to vote for. Now, the design of these ballots evolved
quite a bit throughout the 1800s. Here we see 1880, we've gone from having a
ballot that was just sponsored by an individual candidate, to one that's
sponsored by a party that has all of the party's choices for the different races
written in at the printer's. This is the origin of the, the term, party
ticket. A party ticket or the slate of candidates
that a party is putting forward was originally, literally a, a printed piece of
paper, a ticket that the voter would take and put into ballot box.
This ballot, both of these actually show one other interesting feature that
separates US Elections from elections in most of the rest of the world which is
that we can have a staggering number of different questions on the ballot at the
same time. National races, state races, local races,
as well as referenda. And all of that vastly complicates voting
technology as, as we'll see later. But in this case, you can see in the
ballot on the left the questions, the, the voter's being asked to fill in include who
they want for, for surveyor and coroner in their local jurisdiction.
Now, the Republican ticket you see in the, in the middle, this party ticket is an
early example and it still has enough room between the choices so that if you like
most of the party's choices but not all of them, you can just cross some of them out
and write in your own. But a few years later, we see how this has
evolved. The party is wised up to the fact that,
that they were making it super easy for people to not follow all of their choices.
So, they, they decided to make it harder. These new designed ballots left no room at
all between the different candidates. It would be very, very hard to squeeze in
your own choice there. They're just trying to make it less
convenient for people to split the ticket and write in candidates of their choice,
rather than the parties. It's all or nothing.
You can see there's just one office at the bottom here where the party didn't have a
pick. And so, they've left it blank for the
voter to fill in. Another problem that this kind of ticket
introduced, that's really quite interesting, is that sometimes rival
candidates would print their own version of the party ticket but didn't have the
party's own official choices on it that would be replacing one of the choices with
the candidate's own name but still claiming to be the real party ticket.
And this sort of thing introduced a lot of voter confusion but there was no reason at
the time for it to be against the law. After, after all, maybe the, the voter
really intended to vote for that candidate.
But there was a lot trickery like that in, in the 1800s.
And the non-standard design of the ballots like these just multiplied that the
opportunities for it. Let me give you a couple of, of other
examples of places where nefarious innovations chipped away at, at the
integrity and the, especially the secrecy provided by the paper ballot.
In some cases as, as in this union party ticket a party would print a large sheet
of multiple ballots all, altogether and it was up to the voter to, to tear them out.
This just invited voters to try to vote multiple times or to try to put multiple
pieces of paper into the ballot box at the same time.
Multiple voting or repeating, as it was called was a huge security problem in, in
the 1800s and this is part of what motivated the adoption of voter
registration systems, which would make sure that the, the voter's name was on a
particular list and then, cross it out after the voter voted.
So, that was a security innovation in response to problems like this.
Another nefarious ballot characteristic was printing your parties ballot on a
distinctive color or kind of paper. As you can see here with this, this party
ballot from 1860. So, with the ballot for the party was on a
particular color than people standing around at the polling place could still
check that you were voting for the right party and not for their opponents.
This greatly reduced the amount of privacy that the, the ballot could provide.
Furthermore it represents a tradeoff in technologies like the, the glass ballot
box. So, if you have a glass ballot box, it's
easier to see whether if you've falsely inserted two tickets, easier to make sure
that the ballot box was empty at the beginning.
But it's also then impossible to conceal the color of the ballot paper as your, as
your inserting it, even if you've kept it hidden until you got up to the ballot box.
So, all of these forms of tricks gradually eroded the, the promise of increased
secrecy and integrity that the paper ballots were, were initially thought to
provide. And it took more innovations before the
system could be perfected. We'll hear about that in the next segment.
