Spectacular essay! Thanks so much. I will share this with my fellow historians and others.
Great article, Gregory Downs. Thank you.
When states rewrote or amended their constitutions, they — like Alabama — looked to Massachusetts as a guide to restricting votes. “We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”
117 years ago and counting.
Good article.
But, every so often, history bites back.
Thank you.
Upon adoption of the secret ballot in the U.K. by the Ballot Act of 1872:
Observers said they had never seen "a contested election in which less intoxicating liquor was drunk’, and that the town was so quiet and orderly that “it hardly seemed like an election” at all.
The sweet history of the secret ballot box
The boxes were specially made for the occasion and were marked with a wax seal to make sure no one tampered with the votes. Charmingly, the seal was made with a traditional liquorice stamp of a castle and an owl from a local factory where they used them to stamp Pontefract cakes.
Great article!
Great article and an excellent recommended reading list!
This is the good stuff. I hope the rest of the series is on par. Kudos!
This is really well done. I am sharing widely.
The other historical link is international. The Nazis admired the US southern state’s segregation laws and modeled their Nurenburg Law, which deprived Jews of civil rights in Germany, on that. The affiliation between neo-Nazis and the KKK now is not an accident.
Well done, sir!
Brought up in Australia 
where the secret ballot is, afaik, universally regarded as a triumph to protect the populous from having to explain their vote to neighbors or spouses or bosses or religious officials. Sounds like the “innovation” in the US was to complicate the ballot to make it hard for people to use - put a donkey or an elephant by each candidate name and no problem. Bad faith implementation can corrupt anything.
Fantastic essay. I learned a great deal, and it is useful and applicable knowledge.
Kudos… Professor Downs…
This essay is beyond outstanding.
The sources and recommended reading is a treasure trove.
======
~OGD~
Illuminating…whets one’s appetite for more. Good job!
“The effort to eliminate ‘fraud’ turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze”
So as long as everybody anticipated a big 'ol brawl after the voting, they were more likely to participate in voting??
Thank you for publishing this interesting piece by Gregory Downs on the history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. However, Downs seems to exclude the history of anti-democratic measures in the antebellum south from his analysis. This is a critical omission, as by ignoring a foundational chapter in our history he limits the conclusions he can draw.
I just finished reading “Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South” (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In it Keri Leigh Merritt enumerates the multi-pronged efforts of slaveholding oligarchs to disenfranchise the third of the white population in slaveholding states who were disconnected from the slave economy (and desperately poor as a consequence).
The slaveholding oligarchs were terrified that poor white would vote against the pro-slavery agenda. The abject poverty of these whites was caused by the impossibility of competing for wages fairly with enslaved laborers, the futility of competing for land with capital-rich slaveholders, and the desperate ignorance caused by the refusal of the oligarchs to fund public education. The oligarchs used many of the same methods of disenfranchisement that Downs enumerates his TPM article - criminalization of petty crimes and the subsequent disenfranchisement of felons, restricting the location and hours of polling places, residency requirements, denial of education, extra-legal intimidation, censorship, and even lynching. I.e. well before the civil war began, the slaveholding oligarchs had already developed the playbook of repression that Downs attributes to Jim Crow and nativism.
Downs seems to be arguing that racial and religious animus (be it directed towards immigrants, Catholics, or freed slaves and their descendants) was the primary motivating factor for anti-democratic behavior. But before 1860 the slaveholding oligarchs were disenfranchising men of their own race and religion.
I think a more compelling argument is that the true motivation for anti-democratic measures is economic power. The racist and nativist rhetoric that has shrouded anti-voting efforts from Jim Crow into the 21st century is better understood as convenient propaganda, not a fundamental principle. The biggest beneficiaries of a stunted democracy are not racial or cultural groups, but those with the most economic power in our society.
Aside from the failure to tell the full history of our country, my objection to Downs’s approach is that it could focus today’s activists solely against the prejudice inherent in the anti-democratic forces. But prejudice is best directly combated with shame and moral argument, and today the proponents of prejudice have no shame or capacity for rational argument.
I think a more effective contemporary political strategy is to emphasize economic justice as well as social equality. What the economically powerful are really trying to do when they foment prejudice to cause voter suppression and disenfranchisement is to aggrandize their economic power and impoverish everyone else (without concern for their color, religion, culture, etc.).
Good stuff. I eagerly await the next installment.
Your article was excellent and enlightening, Prof Downs. I knew a good bit about the voting shenanigans in the South from college courses in southern history, but my knowledge of practices in other parts of the country is sorely lacking.