(Page 1 of 32) - Parties Under Siege or Parties in Control? Gauging Causal Influences on Australian Ballot Reform Laws authored by Anderson, Melissa. and Doherty, Brendan.

Anderson/Doherty 1

“Quiet, order, and cleanliness reign in and about the polling-places. I have visited precincts where,
under the old system, coats were torn off the backs of voters, where ballots of one kind have been
snatched from voters’ hands and others put in their places, with threats against using any but the
substituted ballots; and under the new system all was orderly and peaceable. Indeed, the self-respect in
voting under the new system is alone worth all the extra expense to the state.”

(Dana, 1892)

“The great pledge for the security of popular institutions in this country is universal manhood suffrage.
Whatever tends to increase the number of legal voters and to make citizens more active participants in
the affairs of government is wise and salutary. Whatever tends to impair or restrict the right of
franchise, to limit the number of voters, or to vex or harass them in the exercise of this most important
duty is pernicious and dangerous. The Saxton [Australian ballot] bill would make it harder for the
citizen to vote. That is its aim. Its tendency is to gradual disenfranchisement.”

(New York Sun, 1889)

Introduction

The sweeping adoption of Australian ballot laws in the late 1800s and early 1900s changed the

nature of elections in the United States. State governments, not political parties, would control the

printing and distribution of a unified ballot for each election and voters would be able to cast their ballot

in secret, free from fear of coercion by party hacks or employers. Most accounts attribute the Australian

ballot movement to good government reformers who led the effort to take elections out of the hands of

political parties, and cite this measure and other Progressive Era reforms as critical to the subsequent

decline in party strength in the early years of the 20th century. The central question of this study is how,

when the parties were so overwhelmingly dominant in the nineteenth-century political system, did laws

that seemingly would restrict their influence succeed in getting passed in almost every state in the

union?

While no systematic study of the causes of ballot reform exists, there are two schools of thought

about how the reforms came to pass. The first, as described above and known as the traditional account,

sees political parties as the main targets of the ballot reform movement. In this story, good government

reformers worked to limit parties’ control over elections in an effort to improve the democratic