vided for the election of officers by the written ballot.[1] The same system was gradually extended to the election of local officers. In a law passed on February 28, 1797, the General Assembly of Vermont enacted “that the several officers [i. e., town officers] aforesaid, shall be chosen by ballot, or such other method as the voters present shall agree upon.”[2] New Hampshire in 1804 directed the town clerks to be chosen by ballot.[3]
The ballots used in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century were written by hand; but with the great increase in the number of elective offices this became a very laborious task. This difficulty was met in Massachusetts by a decision of the Supreme Court. The plaintiff had, in the election of 1829, tendered a printed ticket containing his vote for fifty-five persons. This ticket was rejected, and on appeal the court held that printed votes were written votes within the meaning of the constitution, which required that “every member of the House of Representatives shall be chosen by written votes.”[4] Maine[5] in 1831 and Vermont[6] in 1839 authorized by statute the use of either printed or written ballots. Five years later Connecticut accomplished the same result by an amendment to its constitution.
This legalization of printed tickets was accompanied in Maine by the requirement that ballots should be printed on clean white paper, without any distinguishing mark or figure besides the names of the persons voted for and the office for which each was intended; and colored ballots were forbidden. In Massachusetts the direct result of the case of Henshaw v. Foster was that the parties began to print tickets on varied-colored paper, which destroyed the secrecy of the vote.[7] In 1839 the system was made even worse by an act requiring ballots to be deposited in the ballot box, open and unfolded.[8] This was as public as the viva voce mode and opened the way to bribery and intimidation. After many efforts, in 1851 the liberals, consisting of Free-Soilers and Democrats, passed the envelope law. This required that votes for governor, lieutenant-governor, state senators and representatives, presidential electors, and
- ↑ Connecticut Constitution, 1818, Art. VI, sec. 7; Massachusetts Constitution, 1780, ch. 1, sec. 3, Art. III; Maine Constitution, 1820, Art. II, sec. 1; New Hampshire Constitution, 1792, Part II, secs. 14, 22; Vermont Constitution, 1777, ch. 2, sec. 17; Rhode Island Constitution, 1842, Art. VIII, secs. 1–3. The written ballot was used in Rhode Island by the middle of the seventeenth century.
- ↑ Vermont Digest, 1808, ch. 41, sec. 5.
- ↑ New Hampshire Laws, 1815, p. 249.
- ↑ Henshaw v. Foster, 9 Pickering (Mass.) 312.
- ↑ Maine Laws, 1831, ch. 518.
- ↑ Vermont R. S., 1839, p. 38.
- ↑ Tracts on the Ballot, No. 5, article by Amasa Walker.
- ↑ Massachusetts Acts and Res., 1839, p. 16.
