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New York graphic designer’s new book vividly illustrates how our ballots reveal the history of America’s evolving politics and prejudices, writes MARYLYNNE PITZ
Our ballots reveal a history of America’s evolving politics and prejudices.
In the presidential election of 2000, Theresa LePore tried to make voting easier for older people in Florida. A Palm Beach County elections supervisor, Ms. LePore designed the now infamous “butterfly ballot” that launched thousands of hanging chads, prompting a contentious recount and angry protests in West Palm Beach.
The butterfly ballot’s alternating zigzag two-column design confused liberal Jewish voters. Instead of supporting Vice President Al Gore, many mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan, a third-party candidate with a history of anti-Semitism.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided the election, ruling in favor of George W. Bush. Four years later, Ms. LePore, dubbed “Madame Butterfly,” lost her bid to remain Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor.
That twisted tale — and the major consequences of bad graphic design — prompted Alicia Yin Cheng to start examining old ballots in library archives from New York to California.
A founding partner of MGMT. design in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ms. Cheng soon learned “how critical the ballot is, but also how fragile the system is,” she said.
Her new book, “This Is What Democracy Looked Like,” is a visual history of this nation’s ballots and will be published June 30 by Princeton Architectural Press.
Ms. Cheng provides a concise history of how America’s voting practices have evolved. Two additional essays offer excellent context — one by Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer, another by Victoria Bassetti, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
When our nation’s population was small during the late 1700s, citizens used their voices to vote. Then, someone in New Jersey observed that casting votes aloud in public while candidates listened, “openly wounded the tender sensibilities of friendship.”
Between 1800 and 1850, waves of immigration increased the nation’s population, swelling it from 5.3 million to 23 million. Paper ballots became more common.
By the Civil War, which began in 1861, soldiers could vote by mailing an absentee ballot. An 1864 ballot for that year’s presidential election promoted Abraham Lincoln’s virtues on the front of the envelope; the back stated the National Union Party’s credo.
Still, most Americans were voting in person at public places like general stores, a schoolhouse or a tavern. Newspapers printed ballots that readers could cut out and use to cast their vote. Political parties exerted power by printing easily distinguishable colorful tickets with a slate of candidates, making it easy to vote a straight party ticket.
Citizens carrying those distinctive tickets to the polling place served as walking advertisements, Ms. Cheng said. Printers decorated ballots with symbols, such as a buck with antlers, eagles, ships, stars or crowing roosters. The candidates pictured are men with earnest faces and thick mustaches.
But some people’s path to the ballot box was “fraught with opportunities to suppress your vote,” Ms. Cheng said. “By the mid-1800s, efforts to exclude the Chinese, the Irish and the Native Americans from voting were in full force. Party workers handed out ballots that were prefilled.”
In the South, North Carolina election officials complained that “Jews, strangers, sailors, servants, negroes and Frenchmen” could vote, noted historian Kirk Harold Porter.
Starting in 1858 in New York City, William “Boss” Tweed ran the Democratic Party’s powerful Tammany Hall political machine, buying immigrants’ votes with coal, food, rum and medical care. Tweed later admitted that regardless of the actual tally, counters of paper ballots announced Tammany Hall candidates as the winners.
“Until the late 1880s, there was no coordinated national effort to safeguard the ballot,” Ms. Cheng said, adding that each state made its own attempts to prevent fraud.
By then, Americans were weary of outright election fraud. In 1908 elections, 36 states used Australia’s “blanket ballot.” With a standardized layout, it listed all candidates alphabetically, stating party affiliation beside their names. This official ballot was distributed only at polling places, and citizens cast their votes privately, behind a door or curtain.
“That was clearly a seminal moment,” Ms. Cheng said. “You
Courtesy of the Division of Political and Military History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution couldn’t just pop a colorful ticket into a box anymore. You had to pay attention, read the names and fill out the ballot.”
Americans also altered the “blanket ballot,” adding columns that allowed voters to choose a straight party ticket. A Pennsylvania ballot from 1906 features Democrat Joseph F. Guffey for governor and congressional candidates.
By the 1890s, voting machines were being patented. As of 1928, their use was widespread. Since then, Americans have used the pull lever, the punch card, the touch screen and the paper-ballot scanner.
As of last year, five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina — still relied on paperless electronic voting machines.
Ms. Bassetti, of the Brennan Center for Justice, believes that for people to trust the integrity of elections, states using electronic machines should have a “voter verified paper audit trail.”
Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina lack that backup.
“Georgia has new machines that do indeed spit out a piece of paper, but the paper is not verifiable as to voter intent,” Ms. Bassetti said, adding that it has a pixelated square black box, similar to a bar code, called a QR code.
While a machine can read the QR code, “The voter doesn’t know if the QR code reflects who they voted for,” Ms. Bassetti said. These machines don’t throw out a paper trail that allows you to easily do a recount.”
The appeal of touch screens, Ms. Bassetti said, is that they “offer some of the benefits of computer technology without the tactile assurance of a paper ballot. “It’s a hybrid and it’s not a good one. I don’t think their benefits outweigh their risks.”
Many election experts, she said, predicted the chaos that unfolded in Georgia’s twice-delayed primary last Tuesday.
“First, they were using new machines that no credible election administration expert thought were fit to use. And two, Georgia has been giving the back of the hand to constructive critics of their system for a long time. They are now finally seeing the cost of ignoring good, constructive expert advice,” Ms. Bassetti said.
That expert advice, Ms. Bassetti said, “was to get hand marked paper ballots with a scanner and to properly staff and resource high turnout precincts. That’s sort of election administration 101.”
The Next Page is different every week: Will Tomer, wtomer@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1932.