You may not need reminding that voting and election integrity have been major public and political concerns in the fallout of the 2020 Presidential Election.
Four years ago, In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions more Americans voted early by mail-in and absentee in-person ballot than ever before.
In a case that is crawling through the court system in Georgia, former President Trump and 18 co-defendants are accused of a coordinated campaign to pressure Georgia elected officials to alter the results of the election in their state.
Last year, Fox News paid out over $785 million dollars settling a defamation case with the company Dominion, which manufactures voting machines. That is just one of many cases Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting machine company, have brought against media companies that have accused their machines of being used in fraud.
That’s just a few of the big headlines.
Almost every state in the union has passed some sort of change to their election or voter registrations laws since 2020, many states and counties have leaned into the popularity of absentee voting and central polling location by expanding options, and states have also developed stricter regulations around acceptable ID.
In the last year, states and the federal government have seen a trend of concern from politicians regarding non-citizens voting — concerns that seem to have started as a reaction to a recent law passed by Washington D.C.’s local government, allowing non-citizens to vote in their local D.C. elections.
Fully fledged citizen residents of D.C. themselves have only been able to vote for president since the 23rd Amendment was passed in 1961.
That last point might be an interesting bit of trivia, but it also points to how much voting has changed over time: Who can vote for what, when we vote and how we vote.
In the week ahead, as part of our Sense of Community series, we’ll explore what voting and elections look like now, but first I wanted to get up to speed. I talked with Dr. Dan Ponder, L.E. Meador Professor of Political Science at Drury University, about the history of elections, election integrity and public perception in America.
“By the 1830’s, all states essentially elected their electors to the electoral college via the popular vote,” Ponder explained, “technically, the Constitution says states can do it however they want to, but all states, certainly by the 1840s...were electing their electors to the electoral college by the popular vote.”
That sounds familiar, but states used a variety of ways to select electors in elections before the 1830s. After the nation's first contested presidential elections in 1796 and 1800, the country knew it had to refine the process.
Those first few elections also set the stage for American political parties, whose influence would only grow throughout the 19th Century.
“For example,” Ponder said, “if somebody was out of a job, the party oftentimes came to their rescue by either giving them a job or groceries, and they very much expected that people would return these favors with support in the election. In many states, you had the party ballot (or the party strip), essentially a strip of paper that had all the names of the candidates for a particular party, and you would show up at the election, and they would give you the ballot...technically you could split it up, but they looked to make sure you voted, and that’s where we get the term ‘straight party ticket.' "
After the Civil War, of course, a series of amendments were passed, including the 15th Amendment, which gave African American men the right to vote.
The post war Reconstruction period wound up with a compromise surrounding one of the most bitterly disputed elections in U.S. history
"That was the Hayes-Tilden election, that was 1876," said Ponder. "Tilden almost certainly had a majority of votes cast, and then there was a question about election integrity and there was a commission that essentially came to a conclusion that they would give the (disputed) electoral votes to Hayes and then the government would pull out of the south essentially ending Reconstruction.”
Reforms after that election moved the country closer to a system that we’d find familiar today.
“You had the adoption (at the end of the 19th Century) of what’s called the Australian ballot," Ponder said. "Each candidate is listed by party, and it’s listed and partitioned out by the office that they’re running for. Also, you had the implementation in most cases of the secret ballot...turnout kind of started to be affected because people were not worried about whether or not the party saw them or how they voted.”
In part two of our series and my conversation with Dr. Ponder, we’ll explore the 20th Century, the rise of the primary, hanging chads, the decline of public trust during the Vietnam and Watergate eras and more.