Heading back from a marathon eight and a half hour day of Green Party canvassing in Norwich yesterday – my calf muscles are going to forgive me for all those four-storey flats eventually, I’m sure — I was enjoying some appropriately political reading, Cultures of Voting: The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, R. Bertrand, J Briquet and P Pels eds, one of those books that makes you realise that things you have taken for granted don’t have the firm foundations that you’d thought. (And a product – published 2007 – of the delightful London Library “new books” shelf – into which I could disappear for days at a time if I had the time.)

The secret ballot seems an obvious, “natural” form of ensuring “real” democracy, even if it does tend to be fetishised in attempts to reconstructed failed states when on-the-ground realities don’t much match the textbooks.

The first thing I learnt was that the secret ballot is an important part of Australian history – indeed it was known for much of the 19th-century and beyond as the “Australian ballot”, since it was there, in 1837 that the method of having “a ballot bearing the names of all the candidates of all parties, so arranged as to ensure absolute secrecy and liberty in voting” first became compulsory. It was only adopted in Britain in 1872, by 4/5 of the US states in 1896, Germany in 1903 and France in 1913. What that did the US southern states was to disenfranchise a large part of the black lower-class (and illiterate) vote.

From F. Gorman, “The Secret ballot in 19th-century Britain”
British political history is traditionally told as the Reform Acts of 1832 (which abolished the worst of the rotten boroughs), of 1867 and 1884-5 as a linear tale of advance of democracy. But Gorman says each was an independent response to individual crisis, and “were meant just as much to check the speed and to dilute the force of democratisation as to encourage it”. (p. 17)

Pre-1872 in Britain there was tumultuous public participation in polls, which began with a nomination ceremony conducted at hustings, a temporary raised wooden structure from which speeches were delivered. The candidates arrived at the head of rival processions of supporters, wearing their respective colours. The poll was usually held the next day, with voters brought to the poll in groups. Their eligibility to vote was checked, the agent on either side could challenge it (and ask them to take loyalty oaths if it was thought they might be Jacobites, radicals or dissenters), then if he “passed” he orally delivered his two votes to the poll clerk, who noted them in the official poll booth. (There was no attempt to keep this secret.)

Those who opposed the secret ballot argued that the vote “was a public trust exercised on behalf of the non-voters by the voters.” (p. 29)

And those in favour had interests that might not square with our views: “The main objective of the bill was to keep the voter ‘from from illegitimate influence’ while securing for him ‘the full force of all those legitimate influences arising from the education, the character and the tone of those with whom he lived.’ … the object of the bill was to protect voters from agitators and mob orators just as much as from electoral patrons.”

“For the ordinary voter to fully realise there were no overt pressures on him to vote in a particular manner would take time … Most tenants seem obediently to have done what was asked of them by their patrons. In Lincolnshire, one of the counties most closely studied, the ballot made little difference, either to patterns of voting ot to patterns of representation… This was also the case in many boroughs.” (p. 32-33)

J. Crowley “Uses and abuses of the secret ballot in the American age of reform”
p. 59 “From the 1880s aristocratic reformers came to realise that the Australian ballot, which they had traditionally opposed, could serve the purposes of the anti-democratic reaction… Left-wing parties and movements were still demanding the ballot in the name of democracy, and Southern supremacists were agitating for it for their own purposes.”

In the South the Austalian ballot was, mostly explicitly and straightforwardly racist…
p.60 “In some cases candidates were placed on the ballot in alphabetical order with no indication of party affiliation. Each ballot, remember, comprised dozens of names. In one famous case the entire ballot was printed in medieval Gothic lettering. … Several states hit on the astute principle that voters should strike out the candidates they did not wish to see elected by drawing a line through three-quarters of the length of their names.” (Which left an awful lot of judgement to the polling officer – very like those pregnant, dimpled and hanging chads of recent memory.

The collection also includes a fascinating account by Christophe Jaffrelot of the development of the voting system in India – how the attempt to overcome illiteracy by use of symbols firmly entrenched a system with only a few parties, but also how the Electoral Commission has developed increasingly sophisticated methods to stop vulnerable groups of voters being intimidated by ensuring the way they voted couldn’t be determined, but how they still often decide collectively how to vote “tactically”.

Some of that fetishisation of the method of voting is found in R. Bertrand’s “The engineers of democracy: election monitoring agencies and political change in post-Suharto Indonesia”, which paints a rather depressing picture of the country in the grip of political militias.

And the secret ballot can be presented as creating division and discord; in David Recondo’s “From Acclamation to Secret Ballot: the Hybridisation of Voting Procedures in Mexican-Indian Communities” is an account of the effects of the 1995 decision in the state of Oaxaca, in the south, to officially recognise the “habits and customs” by which rural communities designated municipal authorities.

p. 160 “Those who have founded a family and own a parcel of community land are obliged to work for the community, in do doing they acquire the right to participate in collective decisions. Women do not always participate in the assembly, although the survey found that in 70 per cent of municipalities they did so.”