Tracy Campbell: No One Should Be Surprised About Allegations of Stolen Elections in the US

[Tracy Campbell is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky and author of Short of the Glory: The Fall and Redemption of Edward F. Prichard Jr. (University Press of Kentucky, 1998). His book on the history of American election fraud will be published next year by Carroll & Graf.]

... In early 2004, after receiving a tame rebuke from the United States over flagrant fraud in Russian elections, President Vladimir V. Putin reminded us not to cast aspersions when we had considerable work to do here.

What we have since learned is that American elections are not as sacred as we had thought. This should not have been a surprise. In fact, for most of our history, Americans have not been confident that their votes would be counted accurately. In many areas of the country, vote buying, ballot-box stuffing, voter suppression and intimidation, even outright thievery have long been components of the political culture, and voters have had to rely on little more than blind faith in hoping that their votes would be accurately assigned to their chosen candidates. As the angry accusations fly in late 2004, where do we stand historically? Are you better off than you were 4, 40, or 100 years ago?

The manner in which people voted for president or other offices in the late 19th century would shock the modern electorate. Women could not vote at all, and African-Americans were finding their franchise decreasing with each passing year. Voting was not a secret affair, and in many areas the parties printed the ballots for distribution at the polling place. Distinctive colors and markings revealed to all onlookers how one's vote had been cast. Kentucky and Virginia still used voice voting. In New York City, open voting produced open vote buying, and Tammany Hall's power rested in its ability to control the polls. When one outraged New Yorker protested the public distribution of $5 bills, some voters threatened him, calling him just a "dude with a clean collar who had come to deprive them of an honest living." Chased away, the observer concluded: "Democracy is a failure."

If democracy had failed in New York, it never had a fighting chance in the South. Officials in one Mississippi county accepted ballots through a slit in a wall, then casually counted all of the Democratic votes and discounted as many Republican ballots as they desired. In 1880, Florida Democrats used Election Day threats to frighten away black voters and stole several ballot boxes outright. The confusing "butterfly ballot" of 2000 had numerous precursors: In North Carolina, under the "eight box" law of 1882, voters had to place ballots in the proper box out of eight receptacles in order to have them counted. In Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, Democrats carried 98 counties that had black majorities, indicating the closed environments in those counties where the right to vote was quickly disappearing for African-Americans. In Loreauville, La., 18 African-Americans died in the three days before the election. The parish, which had supported Republicans before the riots, quickly became a Democratic enclave.

In 1884 Grover Cleveland edged James G. Blaine in the Electoral College by a margin of 219 to 182. All eyes, before and after the race, were on Cleveland's home state of New York, which gave him the presidency by less than 1,000 votes. Blaine and his supporters claimed that imported voters and other illegal votes had cost him New York and, consequently, the White House, but he refused to challenge the results. To the losers, New York election returns were always suspect -- and for good reasons. Four years earlier one observer in New York City found that more than 20 percent of the vote in one precinct had been purchased, at prices ranging from $2 to $5. What struck this observer, a reporter for The Nation, was the casual nature of the vote buying and who participated in it. "Men of the strictest integrity, who would scorn a dishonorable action in any business or social matter, do not hesitate to take an active part in open bribery, and they do not lose caste in the community by so doing," he wrote. "Their action is considered a necessary part of 'practical politics,' and to be applauded in proportion to their success -- i.e., to the number of votes they secure by outbidding their opponents."

Things did not get any better in 1888, when the stench from the presidential contest prompted the GOP chairman, Matt Quay, to make the infamous remark that his party's candidate, Benjamin Harrison, never knew "how close a number of men were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president."

By 1888, reformers were turning to a new voting method, pioneered in Australia, to "purify the ballot." With a uniform ballot printed by the states, and voters making their choices in secret, the Australian system promised to end the vote buying and intimidation that had marked so many elections. In America, by 1892 three-fourths of the states had adopted the secret ballot. Another major reform occurred that year when the first mechanical voting machines were patented. The "perfected voting machine" was hailed by The New York Times as "a device for registering voters without possibility of fraud." The new procedures, however, made little difference in the culture of cheating at the polls, since partisans quickly adapted to the "perfected" technology to ensure victory.

Even with many apparent safeguards in place, 20th-century elections were hardly citadels of popular democracy. Huey Long, Herman Talmadge, Lyndon Johnson, and Tom Pendergast -- on the winning side of much chicanery -- could all testify to that. Presidential races, too, were not immune to the ways of local politics. In 1960 John F. Kennedy's victory was grounded in his slim victories in Illinois and Texas. The manner by which he won overwhelming margins in Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago were even then legend, but a Republican effort to recount votes in Texas also uncovered troubling anomalies. In Fannin County (the home county of House Speaker Sam Rayburn), 6,138 votes were cast, yet only 4,895 poll-tax receipts were recorded. A district judge, J. Harris Gardner, denied the GOP a chance to examine the discarded ballots in Wichita County. A Republican lawyer, Hardy Hollers, implored the judge to open the boxes, in order to better understand why upwards of 150,000 ballots had not been counted. It did not matter whom those voters preferred for president, he argued. "What does matter is that all these people were denied the right to vote."...