Alicia Yin Cheng - This is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot

To my mother,
who showed me joy,
and to my daughter,
who gives me hope.

Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
202 Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534

www.papress.com

2020 Alicia Yin Cheng

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Editor: Sara Stemen
Design: MGMT. design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-61689-887-8
ISBN: 978-1-61689-931-8 (epub, mobi)
Library of Congress control number: 2019951971

FRONT COVER: Regular Republican Ticket, Massachusetts, 1878. American Antiquarian Society.
BACK COVER: Regular Citizens Independent Ticket, California, ca. late 1890s. California Historical Society.

Julian E. Zelizer

Alicia Yin Cheng

Victoria Bassetti

Julian E. Zelizer

Among the most enduring images from the controversial 2000 presidential election was the butterfly ballot. The design of the ballot that was used in Palm Beach County, Florida, created an utter disaster. Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach election supervisor who was responsible for the design, had meant to make things easier. I was trying to make the print bigger so elderly people in Palm Beach County can read it, she said. But many elderly voters were confused by the way that the candidates names were lined up. A substantial number of these voters, who were Jewish and liberal, accidentally offered their support to third-party candidate Pat Buchanan, a conservative with a checkered history of anti-Semitism, instead of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

The bitter fight that unfolded about the design of this ballot and others in Florida was a vivid reminder of the physical dimension of democracy. During the recount process that followed election day, Americans watched on television as officials used magnifying glasses to figure out what these and other ballots said about the intention of voters. While many of the histories of this country revolve around the great ideas of our political system or the institutional design that the founders created with the Constitution, we know too little about the actual mechanisms through which people participate in making our government work.

The ballot is among the most fundamental components of our democracy. The ballot has literally been the way that people make their choice about who should lead them and how the government will register the final decision of the electorate. The ballot itself, which has been paper for most of our history, has been inscribed into the memorabilia that collectors find and history museums preserve. But the history of the ballot is something that we must pay much greater attention to. As the controversy over the 2000 election revealed, the structure and design of the ballot can have enormous consequences for how our politics function or fail us.

In times before ballots were secret, this piece of paper could be used as a mechanism of intimidation and persuasion, since everyone could see who a voter was supporting. Parties also used the ballot to trick voters in certain cases. In 1857 some Democrats printed ballots with a font meant to look like the one on Republican ballots so that voters would be confused. The color of the document or the size of the print also had the potential to mark the voting process. Throughout our history, the way in which the names of parties and candidates were listed and the visuals that were used could favor certain parties or persons and make it difficult for others to gain attention. For African Americans, women, and poor Americans, the paper ballot had enormous importance at different moments as the pathway to full citizenship. Mere access to this treasured piece of paper was what separated those who were disenfranchised from those who wielded the political power.

Americans fought over the design of the ballot as part of the ongoing contest over power. At the same time that some party leaders were determined to preserve ballots that could be easily corrupted, reformers fought for ones that would protect the ability of voters to make their decisions and ensure that every vote was counted. Even the way in which individuals cast their ballots evolved, with greater protections created over time. In 1888, when municipal elections in Louisville, Kentucky, became the first to use the Australian Ballot, which was cast in secret, one writer noted: The election last Tuesday was the first municipal election I have ever known which was not bought outright. In recent years, however, the displacement of the paper ballot by the electronic voting machine has raised all sorts of new issues, including the possibility of hacking by overseas governments.

The following pages offer one of the best visual histories of the ballot that we have available. Readers are taken on a wonderful tour of what voting looked like and what enfranchised America saw when they made their decisions. Through these images, we see the design, the evolution, and the complexities of American democracy in action. The book is a reminder that on election day, the ways in which we process our choices have had as many consequences as what politicians promise and the factors that guide the final decision of the electorate.