A GIF History of the Australian Ballot in the US

(Post 1 of 2) The paper I'm presenting at a political science conference this week deals with party labels on ballots. The GIF above demonstrates how the situation came to be.

It starts with the "Australian Ballot", which is commonly known as the secret ballot today. The Australian ballot replaced party strip ballots, which used to be distributed by the parties themselves in the age of machine politics. Massachusetts and Louisville, KY were the first public entities to issue the Australian Ballot in 1888. As the GIF shows, it then rapidly spread across the United States, with a minor variation in in how the rows and columns are organized.

A key exception is that five southern states did not label the candidates by their partisan affiliation. They did this to suppress black votes. Due to a high incidence of illiterate black voters near the turn of the 20th century in the South, the lack of party labels made it harder for those voters to identify their chosen candidates. (The Democrats controlled the South at this point, and would list the Democartic candidate first and tell illiterate white voters to just vote for the first candidate in every category).

Over the 20th century, those southern states slowly added labels to the ballot. Except Virginia. Virginia was controlled by the Byrd Democratic party machine, and kept labels off the ballot to discourage Republican votes. Virginia voters started voting for Republican Presidential candidates with Nixon in 1968, but Democrats held both houses of the state legislature until 2000. When Republicans took control of the legislature in 2000 they put the party labels on the ballot.

So what was the effect of this change? Read on in Part 2 (link) to find out.

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