Polls

“ Every vote is counted and every voter known, and to make assurance doubly sure the polls are guarded by both parties, and the noble citizen runs the gauntlet through double lines of detestable township or ward politicians, potent for mischief in their sneers and jeers, and, if need be, ready with dirty fists or clubs, sometimes revolvers, to back the edict of the party. ”

“ Even those high-minded dames, who had neither the desire nor the intention of soiling themselves in the handling of a ballot at such a questionable place as the polls, felt in their secret hearts that they should have the right to do this if they chose. ”

“ Then it is that the non-political electors who do not trouble to vote on ordinary occasions flock to the polls in their hundreds of thousands, that numbers of voters who held their opinions weakly go over to the other side, and that the candidates of the Party in power are made to feel the full weight of their combined wrath. ”

“ I cannot for the life of me perceive that the State can be held to have elected persons whom it did not in fact elect, because it is conjectured, or even made probable, that if voters who kept away from the polls had in fact attended and voted, they would have made a majority for these persons. ”

“ They have never seen a primary, and they have an aversion for the polls.
7. Men proposing to create a Casting Vote lodge should not advertise their purpose; conspiracies for good, like conspiracies for evil, are best conducted privately until success is sure. The poll of the two Great Parties should be examined, and the winning party’s majority noted. It is this majority which the Casting Vote must overcome and nullify. ”

“ In the individual polls it is rare indeed to find one which runs into four figures, though the voters upon the register in the wards are usually from 3000 to 5000. Local elections have been "democratised," but the democracy, after many years' trial, still stands aloof. What voting there is, is organised by the efforts of candidates themselves. ”

“ No candidate is returned unless he not only polls a number of votes in excess of one-sixth of the total number of enrolled electors within the district, but has also an absolute majority of all the votes cast. ”

“ It may seem strange that a party thus constituted and led should poll such a heavy vote. But in our large cities, and progressively in the country as a whole, the active managing portion of a party bears a very small proportion to the vote which it polls. In New York or Philadelphia, as in San Francisco, but a handful of men make the tickets between which, on election-day, the majority of voters must choose. ”

“ When a man can walk up to the ballot-box with his wife or his sister on his arm, voting-places will be far more agreeable 253 than now, and the polls will not be such bear-gardens that refined men will be constantly tempted to omit their political duties there. ”

“ For their want of intimate knowledge of affairs, I do not think this ought to disqualify them from voting at any town-meeting which I ever attended. I could heartily wish the objection were sound. But if any man will take the trouble to see how our people vote,—how many gentlemen are willing to take on themselves the trouble of thinking and determining for you, and, standing at the door of the polls, give every innocent citizen his ticket as he comes in, informing him that this is the vote of his party ”

“ This is what I mean by saying that I recognize in political life objects far superior to the pretended advantage of my party. Such a doctrine may appear strangely heretic to those who know nothing higher than obtaining at the polls a majority for their candidates, whoever their candidates may be. ”

“ Our wards and precincts should be made smaller, so that people can vote without violence, without wasting an entire day, so that the honest business man that wishes to cast his ballot for the Government of his choice can walk to the polls like a gentleman and deposit his vote and go about his affairs. Allow me to say that unless some such plan is adopted in the United States, there never will be another fair election in this country. ”

“ The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. ”

“ Under the new system, especially in large cities, they will frequently be the effective power at the polls—the sovereign power, by producing a majority—making and administering our laws and regulating our courts by their ballots ”

“ Let all 201good citizens, at every spare moment from this hour to the election, go forth to urge their immediate kith and kin and fellow clansmen to turn out at the polls and vote for the banishment of these places and let my friends who have taken the especial Oath of the Strict Observance consider this election their charge and let them leave nothing undone that will secure a full showing at the polls of the voters of whatever persuasion. The only way to lose this election is by staying at home. ”

“ Says the Review of the River Plate: “In electoral matters the country is as backward as it was one hundred years ago, and outside the federal capital there is no freedom of the polls, force always carries the day—and the elections. ”

“ It is enough that I must mingle with the brawling crowd on election day," and the speaker indignantly signified his desire to dismiss the discussion of such a subject, leaving me to meditate in silence upon all the positions the ballot might compel me to occupy.
To many a mind that most insignificant part of the question, "going to the polls," is a most serious objection to the whole suffrage movement, for what woman, It is asked, would be willing to mix with the drunken, fighting, excited throng that gathers around the ballot box? ”

“ Keeping the polls open once in so often, a few hours, and using hearsay and little slips of paper—anybody dropping in—seems a rather fluttery and uncertain way to pick out the representatives of the people, after one has considered three blocks of Oxford Street. ”

“ So the voters who are to go to the polls are, by their common nature, Englishmen; they are essentially neither Socialist curs nor Conservative sheep, but intrinsically capable of becoming either, if they become captured by either system of party organization. ”

“ The electoral college consists of the men elected at the polls in the various States to record the decrees of the majorities in those States, and it has grown to be an axiom of politics that they must merely register the will of the men who elected them. ”

“ For what happens where it is supposed to exist? The citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he says anything at all, he says Yes or No. ”

“ Some few members of the Cabinet might have provided for a rainy day, but even to many of official class, and practically to all of the rank and file, a reversal at the polls must mean that they would have to give up a variety of highly-esteemed privileges and return to private life in less interesting capacities, some in very humble ones indeed. ”

“ At the same time, practical politicians who make a profession of herding voters, getting them out to the polls at the times they are needed and determining for them, by the familiar campaign devices, the persons and the issues for which they are to cast their ballots, have worked out very definite methods for dealing with masses of people, so that they are able to predict the outcome with considerable accuracy far in advance of an election and make their dispositions accordingly. ”

“ The wave of democracy which swept the country in the last century had the double effect of increasing the number of elective offices, and of shortening the terms during which officials were allowed to hold office. A greatly lengthened ballot, together with the great frequency of elections, has made it impossible for the average voter to exercise proper judgment at the polls. The difficulty of investigating the merits of the numerous candidates, or even of becoming familiar with their names, has discouraged many from voting. ”

“ He subscribed one dollar a year to the civil-service reform journal, and invariably voted on Election Day for the best men, cutting out in advance the names of the candidates favored by the Law and Order League of his native city, and carrying them to the polls in order to jog his memory. ”

“ Each petty political unit having a municipal government of its own comprises a voting precinct. If at the first ballot no candidate in the district receives a majority of all the votes cast, a second ballot is taken, when a simple plurality is decisive. A noteworthy feature of the system is the fact that voters who on account of illness, military service, or other valid reason, are unable to appear at the polls are permitted to transmit their votes in writing to the proper election officials. ”

“ Polling is completed within an individual constituency during the course of a single day, the hours being from eight o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock in the evening, but under the arrangements that have been described it falls out that a national election is extended invariably through a period of more than two weeks. The system operates, of course, to the advantage of the plural voter, who is enabled to present himself at the polls from day to day in widely separated constituencies. For the convenience of voters constituencies are divided regularly into districts, or precincts. ”

“ In every election precinct—there are probably twenty or thirty in each assembly district—a captain and from two to a dozen subordinates are appointed. [11] These have charge of the actual giving out of the ballots at the polls. On election day they are at their places long before the hour set for voting; each party has a wooden booth, looking a good deal like a sentry-box, covered over with flaming posters containing the names of their nominees, and the “workers” cluster around these as centres. Every voter as he approaches is certain to be offered a set of tickets ”

“ Now, gentlemen, do you talk to woman of a rude jest or jostle at the polls, where noble, virtuous men stand ready to protect her person and her rights, when, alone in the darkness and solitude and gloom of night, she has trembled on her own threshold, awaiting the return of a husband from his midnight revels?—when, stepping from her chamber, she has beheld her royal monarch, her lord and master—her legal representative—the protector of her property, her home, her children, and her person, down on his hands and knees slowly crawling up the stairs? ”

“ We know that this is a power which may be abused; but that is no argument against its existence. For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts. ”

“ If a Revolutionary Father could visit his old haunts on election day, he would be astonished at the sober decorum. In his time elections lasted three days, days filled with harangue, with drinking, betting, raillery, and occasional encounters. Even those whose memory goes back to the Civil War can contrast the ballot peddling, the soliciting, the crowded noisy polling-places, with the calm and quiet with which men deposit their ballots today. For now every ballot is numbered and no one is permitted to take a single copy from the room. Every voter must prepare his ballot in the booth. ”

“ The minority member is nailed to his seat, and can neither take office nor retire, except at a general election. All complicated arrangements are apt to harbor wire-pulling, for the wire-puller, even if he is baffled at first, soon learns the trick. The only measure of this kind which appears to promise real improvement is the adoption of the second ballot when no candidate has polled an absolute majority at the first. ”

“ The Prior, however, as our interim chief, must proceed to work; get ready 'Twelve Monks,' and set off with them to his Majesty at Waltham, there shall the election be made. An election, whether managed directly by ballot-box on public hustings, or indirectly by force of public opinion, or were it even by open alehouses, landlords' coercion, popular club-law, or whatever electoral methods, is always an interesting phenomenon. A mountain tumbling in great travail, throwing up dustclouds and absurd noises, is visibly there; uncertain yet what mouse or monster it will give birth to. ”

“ To call on a hundred thousand voters, scattered over fifty or sixty thousand square miles, to make out a ticket of a dozen or more electors, is to ask them to do that which, individually, they cannot properly or successfully do. Very few would have the information necessary to make a proper selection; and even if every voter had such information, the diversity of opinion and the want of concentration on the same persons, would be so great, that it would be a matter of mere accident, who would have the majority. ”

“ The campaigns increase in intensity week after week and expire, or explode, in a blaze of glory the night before election, at which time the committees of the leading parties set forth the reasons that make each side certain of success. On election day a hush spreads over the land and the voters wend their way to the polling places, where each voter is permitted to register a sovereign's will. ”

“ This is accomplished by enabling him to vote in secret; for, in that case, the man who could otherwise compel his vote, is ignorant in what direction it has been given. In all cases,therefore, in which the independent interests of the voter, those which, in propriety of language, may be called his own interests, would dictate the good and useful vote; but in which cases, at the same time, he is liable to be acted upon in the way either of good or of evil, by men whose interests would dictate a base and mischievous vote, the ballot is a great and invaluable security ... ”