The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  In California, the registration laws evolved in stages. In the 1850s and early 1860s, men could establish their eligibility through their own declarations; widely voiced concerns about fraud, particularly in San Francisco, led not to statutes but to organized armies of poll watchers who kept an eye on elections. This informal vigilance (a term frequently invoked by the city’s elite) was supplanted in 1866 by the California Registry Act. The act was sponsored by a predominantly Republican faction of the Unionist Party: although Democrats denounced the bill as a “fraud and a swindle” and “an act of hostility to the Democratic party,” broadly based worries about corruption guaranteed its passage through the legislature. 67

  The Registry Act instructed county clerks throughout the state to prepare Great Registers that would include the names of all legal voters. To enroll, a prospective voter had to appear in person before the county clerk and present evidence of his eligibility, if he was not known personally to the clerk. To the dismay of the Democrats, naturalized citizens were obliged to present their original, court-sealed naturalization papers. In the absence of such papers, an immigrant’s eligibility could be established only through the testimony of two “householders and legal voters” and by residence in the state for a full year, double the normal requirement. The Registry Act, moreover, imposed a remarkable deadline on prospective voters: registration had to be completed three months before a general election.68

  Despite their fears, the Democrats did extremely well in the 1867 elections and became supporters of voter registration—in part because they worried about future Republican chicanery. Five years later, the legislature revised the Registry Act, tightening it in some respects, liberalizing it in others. A special procedure was created to permit registration after the three-month deadline, and the evidentiary burden placed on naturalized citizens was lightened. Yet voters who moved from one county to another were presented with a new obstacle: before registering, they had to present written proof that their prior registration had been canceled.69

  A more significant tightening of the law, targeted only at San Francisco, took place in 1878. The “Act to regulate the registration of voters, and to secure the purity of elections in the city and county of San Francisco” was sponsored by Republicans and designed, at least in part, to rebuff the insurgent and anti-establishment Workingmen’s Party. The act removed control of the city’s elections from the elected board of supervisors and vested it instead in a board of commissioners consisting of the mayor and four appointed county officials; it also created a registrar of voters, appointed by the governor, who was empowered to purge the registers of names suspected to be fraudulent. The 1878 act required each voter to reregister in person before every general election, and most important, it terminated city and countywide registration, demanding that voters register within their own electoral precinct. The precincts were to be created by the commissioners and could not include more than 300 voters. In San Francisco, as in Chicago, any man who moved out of a very small neighborhood was obliged to reregister.70

  During the Progressive era, California’s registration laws were revised further, making it somewhat easier for many men to vote. Naturalized citizens who lacked papers no longer were required to present affidavits from registered voters; paperwork was standardized; the number of places where a person could register was increased; registration was permitted until forty days before an election; and voters who moved could cancel their previous registration while registering in their new place of residence. A few new requirements, however, were added. Biannual registration became compulsory everywhere, not just in San Francisco, and all landlords and lodging-house keepers were required to provide registry officers with lists of their tenants. If a registered voter’s name did not show up on these lists, he was sent a citation through the mail demanding that he appear before the election commissions to verify his eligibility within five days. If he failed to appear “at the time appointed, his name shall be stricken from the register of voters.”71

  The examples of New Jersey, Illinois, and California suggest the significance of the fine print in the extremely lengthy and detailed registration statutes adopted by most states from the time of the Civil War through the aftermath of World War I. Nearly everywhere, such laws emerged from a convergence of partisan interest with sincere concern about electoral fraud; the extent to which they prevented honest men from voting varied over time and from state to state. The length of the registration period, its proximity to the date of an election, the size of registration districts, the frequency of reregistration, the necessity of documentary evidence of eligibility, the location of the burden of proof—all of these and others were critical details, subject to dispute, change, and partisan jockeying. Moreover, a close examination of the laws of nearly two dozen states reveals little in the way of national trends. To cite one example, some states, including New York and Ohio, began to insist on annual personal registration in large cities, while others simultaneously were moving toward systems of permanent registration. Much depended on local conditions and local episodes. New York City in 1908 took a swipe at Jewish voters, many of whom were Socialists, by holding registration on the Jewish Sabbath and on the holy holiday of Yom Kippur.72

  The political dynamics revealed in New Jersey, Illinois, and California frequently were replicated elsewhere. Republicans and reform-minded middle-class independents tended to be the prime movers behind registration itself and behind provisions likely to have a disproportionate impact on poor, foreign-born, uneducated, or mobile voters. Similarly, legislators from rural and semirural districts tended to favor stringent registration requirements that would apply only to city dwellers. (Rural political leaders generally argued that it would be a hardship for their constituents to travel twice each fall, first to register and then to vote.) Resistance to strict registration systems generally came from urban Democrats, from machine politicians who correctly regarded the new laws as attempts to reduce their electoral strength. Yet the targets of registration laws were not always corrupt machines. In 1895, the Republicans who dominated Michigan’s legislature passed a reregistration law expressly designed to disfranchise foreign-born voters who supported Detroit’s indisputably honest reform mayor, Hazen Pingree. “It will take off the books just about enough Pingree votes to prevent his ever becoming mayor again,” declared the bill’s sponsor. Pennsylvania’s Republicans—who for decades resisted registration laws that would have harmed their own political machine—took similar action against a crusading reformer in Pittsburgh in 1906.73

  Indeed, in most cities, the machines learned to live with and take advantage of the systems of registration that were imposed on them. They rapidly mastered techniques for insuring that their own voters were registered, and when in power, they often embraced the registration laws as a means of keeping other men and women from voting. As political scientist Steven Erie has pointed out, once securely ensconced, the Irish political machines that dominated city politics in numerous cities often displayed little interest in mobilizing new voters, particularly southern and eastern European immigrants. (In some states, such as Massachusetts, friction with the Irish led numerous new immigrants to support Yankee Republicans.) By mobilizing their own constituencies and supporting cumbersome registration laws that made it difficult for others to vote, Irish political machines could keep a ceiling on their expenses, while reducing threats to their own power—a stance that may well have contributed to the decline in political conflict over registration during the Progressive era. Political machines flourished during this period, with and without strong registration systems.74

  Meanwhile, state courts sanctioned the creation of registration systems, as long as they did not overtly narrow the constitutional qualifications for voting. Even when state constitutions did not authorize or instruct legislatures to pass registration laws (more than twenty did so by 1920), the courts generally were sympathetic. “A wise system of registration,” concluded an Ohio court in 1885, was an
efficacious means “to prevent fraud, insure integrity at the polls, and enable the honest and qualified elector to exert his just influence.” The courts did occasionally overturn statutes that seemed too restrictive, such as an Ohio law that opened the registration rolls for only seven days each year and made no provision for voters who happened to be absent during that period. Yet on the whole they endorsed registration as a reasonable component of electoral administration. Courts also upheld the legitimacy of registration laws that applied only to particular classes of cities, despite objections that such laws violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As a rule—outside of the South, at least—the courts applied the same principles to primary elections as to general elections.75

  The impact of these laws was highly variable and depended not only on the details of the laws themselves but also on the ability and determination of political parties to get their own voters registered. Quantifying such an impact is beyond the scope of this study, but it can be said with certainty that registration laws reduced fraudulent voting and that they kept large numbers (probably millions) of eligible voters from the polls. In cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, only 60 to 70 percent of eligible voters were registered between 1910 and 1920; in wards inhabited by the poor, the figures were significantly lower. In San Francisco between 1875 and 1905, an average of only 54 percent of adult males were registered. Electoral turnout dropped steadily during precisely the period when registration systems were being elaborated, and scholars have estimated that one-third or more of that drop, nationally, can be attributed to the implementation of registration schemes.76

  In some places the impact was far more dramatic and instantly visible. In New Jersey, for example, the passage of new registration laws in the early twentieth century was immediately followed by such a sharp plunge in turnout, particularly in the cities, that a New Brunswick newspaper concluded that “the critics who declared that the Geran Act would result in the disfranchisement of thousands were justified.” Similarly, in Pittsburgh in 1907, the newly created registration commission crowed, in the private minute books of its meetings, that “the figures speak for themselves as to the good results obtained under the operation of the Personal Registration Act.” The number of men registered to vote had dropped from 95,580 to 45,819.77

  Postscript: Fraud, Class, and Motives

  Proponents of ballot reform and elaborate registration procedures—as well as other measures, such as early poll closings—invariably defended such steps as necessary to prevent fraud and corruption. Legislative debates were sprinkled heavily with tales of ballot-box stuffing, miscounts, hordes of immigrants lined up to vote as the machine instructed, men trooping from precinct to precinct to vote early and often. The goal of reform, according to its advocates, was not to shrink the electorate or to prevent certain social groups from voting, but to guarantee honest elections. Unsurprisingly, historians—guided by a written record largely composed by the literate, victorious reformers—often have echoed this perspective: late-nineteenth-century and Progressive-era political reformers have commonly been portrayed as honest middle- and upper-class citizens who were trying to clean up politics, to end the corruption practiced by ethnically based political machines and their unscrupulous business allies.78

  That such portraits are too monochromatic—and misleading—is suggested by the utterances of the reformers themselves: their antagonism toward poor, working-class, and foreign-born voters was thinly disguised at best, and many of them unabashedly welcomed the prospect of weeding such voters out of the electorate. Still, the question of fraud remains: Was corruption so rampant that the reformers’ motives can be taken at face value, that their intentions can be viewed as democratic, whatever the consequences? Should registration laws and ballot reform be understood primarily as weapons in the battle against election fraud, or as techniques for diminishing the breadth of democracy?

  The available evidence—inescapably fragmentary and uneven—does not offer definitive answers to such questions. On the one hand, fraud and corruption clearly did exist: complaints came not only from upper-crust reformers but from labor organizations and Populists; moreover, the memoirs of politicians contain numerous acknowledgments of improper and illegal practices. On the other hand, recent studies have found that claims of widespread corruption were grounded almost entirely in sweeping, highly emotional allegations backed by anecdotes and little systematic investigation or evidence. Paul Kleppner, among others, has concluded that what is most striking is not how many but how few documented cases of electoral fraud can be found. Most elections appear to have been honestly conducted: ballot-box stuffing, bribery, and intimidation were the exception, not the rule.79

  The evidence also suggests that urban, machine politicians and their ethnic constituents were not alone in skirting or ignoring the borders of legality. Boss Tweed of New York, living in splendor from the abundant kickbacks he received through his largely Irish “organization,” was surely the most well-known corrupt politician of the late 1860s and 1870s. But perhaps the most celebrated instance of electoral irregularity in the 1890s occurred in rural Adams County, Ohio, where 90 percent of the electorate, entirely from “old and excellent American stock,” was being paid to vote. In addition, coercive pressure to vote (and to vote the right way) came not only from political machines, democratic and republican, but also from employers and corporations.80

  To cite one little-known but vivid example: in 1914, general elections were held in Huerfano County, Colorado, which at the time was embroiled in a prolonged strike of coal miners against Colorado Fuel and Iron and several other coal companies. The bitter strike already had produced the infamous Ludlow massacre of striking families living in a tent city; it also prompted the federal government to send troops to maintain order. The elections resulted in a victory for the Republican slate of candidates, headed by the powerful sheriff, J. B. Farr. A lawsuit brought by the Democrats, however, revealed a remarkable set of irregularities. The Republicans, working with Colorado Fuel and Iron, had drawn precinct boundaries so that seven precincts in the county were located entirely on company-owned land. On registration days and election day, company guards refused to permit anyone to enter these precincts who was thought to be a union member, an agitator, or a labor sympathizer. Foreign-born scabs who lived in the mining camps then were marched to the polls by company officials; since many were illiterate, they were given printed cards containing the letter R and illegally assisted by election judges. These voters were instructed to move the cards along the ballot and place their mark beside any name that had a party designation of R. Nearly 90 percent of the vote went to the Republicans in these “closed” precincts, enough to overcome a Democratic majority elsewhere in the county. The violations of the law were so flagrant that the Colorado Supreme Court eventually voided the election, overturning the decision of local (Republican) judges who claimed to have seen no evidence that fraudulent votes had been cast.81

  What transpired in Huerfano County was not the type of fraud that agitated the relatively well-off and largely Republican men who pushed for strict registration systems and other “honest ballot” reforms. These reformers, who were so sensitive to the dubious practices of urban political machines, rarely mentioned abuses by employers, and their support for registration procedures applicable only to cities ignored the possibility of rural corruption. Many of the reformers, moreover, ended up joining the Democrats in turning a blind eye to the flagrant disfranchisement of blacks and poor whites in the South. The measures they proposed to “purify the ballot box” were aimed largely at particular ballot boxes and particular voters.

  This is not to say that reformers’ claims about fraud were mere window dressing, cynical efforts to mask partisan motives or antidemocratic intentions; such cynicism surely was present among some advocates of registration laws and ballot reform, but there was more to it than that. As Kleppner and others have pointed out, corruption was a word with ma
ny meanings, and reformers deployed the term to refer to practices that seemed (to them) inappropriate as well as illegal. Paying people to get out the vote seemed corrupt, as did paying poll taxes so that constituents could vote—even if there were no direct partisan strings attached to the payments. Reformers also believed that votes were corrupt when they were prompted by narrow self-interest—as, for example, when a man voted the way his ward boss asked him to, in return for the favor of a job or a free coal delivery.82

  In addition, it seems altogether likely that many proponents of electoral regulation were genuinely offended by the state of political practices: they believed that fraud was epidemic, particularly in the cities. Yet that belief was itself linked to and shaped by class and ethnic tensions. Respectable middle-class and upper-class citizens found it easy to believe that fraud was rampant among the Irish or among new immigrant workers precisely because they viewed such men as untrustworthy, ignorant, incapable of appropriate democratic behavior, and not a little threatening. Stories about corruption and illegal voting seemed credible—and could be magnified into apprehensive visions of systematic dishonesty—because inhabitants of the slums (like blacks in the South) appeared unworthy or uncivilized and because much-despised machine politicians were somehow winning elections.