From the Secret Ballot to HAVA, a Timeline of How Americans Came to Vote

Picture the American voter of 1800 walking up to the polling place, stating his choice out loud in front of his neighbors, his employer and the fellow he owes money to, and then going home to see how that worked out. We call that "democracy in action." He might have called it "Tuesday, and I'd like to leave now."

Folks, the way we vote today, a private ballot printed by the government, counted by officials of the state, cast on a single day set by Congress, is not some ancient tablet handed down from the mountain. It was built one reform at a time over more than two centuries, usually by people who were angry about the last system. Let me walk you through the dates, tell you why each one mattered, and then pull a few lessons out of the pile. Skip the lessons if you must, but you will miss the best part.

Before the ballot, the voice

Colonial era and the early Republic: voice voting. In most of the colonies, and in much of the country for decades after independence, a voter stood before the election officials and announced his choice aloud. Some places used a show of hands, and some used a paper ballot the voter supplied himself. Why it mattered: the vote was a public act. Everyone knew who voted for whom, which meant that a landlord, a creditor or a political boss had every opportunity to remember. The right to vote existed, but the freedom to vote your conscience was another matter.

1787 to 1789: the Constitution leaves the qualifications to the states. Article I, Section 2 says electors for the House shall have "the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." In plain English, whoever a state lets vote for its own legislature can vote for Congress. Early voters were mostly property-owning men, and the rules varied by state. Why it mattered: the Framers chose not to write one national franchise. The decision to leave it to the states is the reason this timeline has fifty tracks and not one.

Early 1800s: property tests fade. State by state, the property qualification gave way to broader white male suffrage, a development often associated with the 1820s and 1830s. Why it mattered: the electorate got larger and louder, and the parties that grew up to organize it needed ways to get voters to the polls and make sure they voted the party's slate.

The party ticket era

Through the nineteenth century: party-printed tickets. The government did not print ballots. Parties did. Each party produced its own paper "ticket" listing its own candidates, usually in a distinctive color or with a distinctive design, and party workers handed them out at the polls. The voter took his party's ticket and dropped it in the box. Why it mattered: a voter holding a bright, party-colored slip was announcing his vote to the whole crowd, ballot box or no ballot box. A secret ballot it was not. It was voice voting with extra steps and a nicer paper stock. Ballot printing also gave parties a handle on vote buying, because a buyer could see the ticket his money had purchased.

1845: Congress sets a single Election Day for presidential electors. An act of January 23, 1845 fixed the day on which electors would be chosen as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Before that, states picked their own days, and voting dragged across weeks. Why it mattered: the Constitution says in Article II, Section 1 that "Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes." That is a power with a clear owner, and in 1845 Congress used it. A single day meant that a state voting early could not influence the states voting late. Congress extended the idea to House elections in 1872 and later to Senate elections.

Why November, and why Tuesday? The usual explanation is that the date was set for a farm country that had finished its harvest and had not yet met its winter, and that Tuesday gave the voter a day to travel to the county seat without breaking the Sabbath. Whether you find that charming or a bit quaint, it explains why the date is where it is. It was designed around the American calendar of 1845, which is more than I can say for most of what Congress does today.

The Amendments that widened the door

1870: the Fifteenth Amendment. It forbids denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Why it mattered: it wrote the principle into the Constitution after the Civil War, and then spent a century waiting for enforcement. If you want that story in full, read The 15th Amendment Promised the Vote and Took Ninety-Five Years to Enforce.

1888: the secret ballot arrives. Reformers borrowed the Australian ballot, a government-printed ballot listing all candidates, marked in private and cast in a booth. Louisville, Kentucky, used a version of it in a local election in 1888, and Massachusetts followed within about a year as the first state to adopt it statewide. Within about a decade most states had followed. Why it mattered: it ended the colorful party ticket and the public display of the vote, and it broke the grip of bosses who could stand outside the polling place and check on the purchase. The state, not the party, now ran the ballot. The change moved a core function of democracy from partisan hands to public ones, which is one of the better ideas in American government.

1913: the Seventeenth Amendment. State legislatures had elected senators since the Constitution's first draft. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, moved to direct popular election. Why it mattered: it changed the Senate's relationship to the states, a change that conservatives still argue over, and it added a second popular election to the ballot in every state.

1920: the Nineteenth Amendment. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Why it mattered: it doubled the potential electorate, and it was the result of a movement that organized for more than seventy years, state by state, until the votes were there.

The modern rules

1964: the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. It bans poll taxes in federal elections. Why it mattered: it removed a fee that had kept the poor from the polls, a cost on the vote that was never about security.

1965: the Voting Rights Act. Signed August 6, 1965. It outlawed the tests and devices used to keep Black citizens from registering, and it required some jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before changing their election rules. Why it mattered: in the Deep South, registration of Black citizens rose dramatically within a few years, and the law gave the Fifteenth Amendment the enforcement it had lacked since 1870. It has been amended and reauthorized several times, and the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder struck down the formula that decided which jurisdictions needed advance approval. The story of that formula is in Shelby County v. Holder Asked Whether Old Data Could Still Govern the States.

1971: the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. It lowered the voting age to eighteen. Why it mattered: the argument that a person old enough to be drafted is old enough to vote had been made through the Vietnam years, and the amendment was ratified in about three months, among the fastest in American history.

1993: the National Voter Registration Act. Signed in 1993, the law, nicknamed "motor voter," requires states to offer voter registration at driver's license offices and public assistance agencies, to accept mail-in registration, and to keep voter lists accurate through reasonable list maintenance. Why it mattered: it made registration easier and, in the same breath, imposed a duty to clean up the rolls. That second half gets less attention than it deserves, which I take up in Clean Voter Rolls Are a Legal Duty, What the 1993 Motor Voter Law Requires.

2000: Florida and Bush v. Gore. The presidential election came down to a few hundred votes in Florida, and a recount fight dragged on for weeks. The Supreme Court ended it on December 12, 2000, in Bush v. Gore. Why it mattered: the country discovered that its voting machinery was a patchwork of punch cards, lever machines and optical scanners, administered under rules that varied from county to county. Anyone who watched a grown man hold a punch card up to the light looking for a "chad" will tell you that nobody had designed this on purpose.

2002: the Help America Vote Act. HAVA, signed on October 29, 2002, was Congress's answer. It provided federal money for states to replace outdated punch-card and lever machines, required each state to maintain a computerized statewide voter registration list, set up provisional ballots for voters whose names do not appear on the rolls, required some first-time voters who registered by mail to show identification, and created the Election Assistance Commission. Why it mattered: it was the first time Washington put real money and real standards behind the mechanics of elections. It changed the equipment, it changed the lists, and, importantly, it did so without taking the administration of elections away from the states.

Two entries I left out of the main line

Every timeline has a trapdoor, and two entries belong beside the ones above.

1804: the Twelfth Amendment. After the tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in the election of 1800 threw the choice into the House, the states ratified an amendment, completed in June 1804, that had electors cast separate ballots for President and Vice President. Why it mattered: it fixed a design flaw the party system had exposed, and it shows that the Founders' machinery could be repaired by amendment when it broke. The full story is in The Election of 1800 Broke the Electoral College and the 12th Amendment Fixed It.

1868: the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 2 reduced a state's House representation if it denied the vote to adult male citizens, and the amendment's Equal Protection Clause later became the basis for the one-person-one-vote cases of the 1960s. Why it mattered: the amendment gave federal courts and Congress a constitutional hook to look at how states treated voters, a hook that every later chapter in this timeline pulls on.

The machines. The ballot box is a story in hardware too. Lever voting machines first appeared in the early 1890s, with an early use in Lockport, New York, and they spread through the twentieth century, followed by punch cards and then optical scanners and touchscreens. Each generation promised to end the errors of the one before. Each generation, naturally, produced a new kind of error. A voting machine is a computer that sits in a school gymnasium for one day every two years, and then we ask it to be perfect. That is a tall order for a gymnasium.

Four things the timeline teaches

I promised lessons. Here they are, and I'll number them so the argument is easy to find.

1. The Constitution built a decentralized system on purpose. Look at the pattern. States set the qualifications in 1787. States ran their own Election Days until 1845. States decided whether to adopt the secret ballot. States run the machines today. Washington appears at specific moments, mainly through the amendments and through Congress's power under Article I, Section 4 to "make or alter" the rules for congressional elections, which I examine in The Elections Clause Lets States Run Elections and Lets Congress Step In. A system with fifty administrators is messier than one with a single national office, and it is also harder for any faction to capture. I'd call that a feature.

1. Most reforms followed a scandal or a failure. The secret ballot answered vote buying and boss control. The single Election Day answered the staggered voting that let one state influence another. The 1965 act answered a century of evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment. HAVA answered a recount nobody wanted to repeat. The lesson for the modern argument is that rules that look fussy are usually scar tissue from some earlier mess. Before you scrap a rule, ask what it was invented to stop.

1. Reform that sticks is reform that changes the mechanism, not the mood. Voice voting did not die because people got more virtuous. It died because the booth made secrecy the default. Reliable elections come from design, not from sermons. That is the conservative instinct about institutions generally, and it applies to the voting booth as much as to the budget.

1. Access and integrity are not enemies. The timeline is full of laws that did both. The secret ballot protected the voter and made fraud harder. The 1993 act made registration easier and required list maintenance. HAVA bought machines and required statewide lists. Whenever you hear that you must choose one or the other, check whether someone is selling you a false choice. The best election laws have usually delivered a little of each.

What the timeline does not say

A timeline invites a certain smugness, the feeling that we are the product of steady progress, so let me add a caution. The list above is the story of expansion and mechanics. It leaves out the fights over what counts as a reasonable rule today: ID requirements, mail ballots, early voting, deadlines and list maintenance. On those questions the Constitution gives states and Congress wide latitude, and decent people disagree. For a clear-eyed look at what both parties get wrong about those debates, see Eight Myths About Election Rules That Both Parties Repeat Every Cycle.

And one more cautionary note about the calendar. The reason courts are reluctant to change election rules close to an election is that a voter, a clerk and a candidate all need to know the rules in advance. That is the logic of Purcell v. Gonzalez and Why Judges Should Not Rewrite Election Rules Late. If you want a reform, pass it early and publish it widely.

The case in brief

1. The American way of voting was assembled in stages: voice voting, party-printed tickets, a single Election Day in 1845, the secret ballot from 1888, and a series of amendments from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-Sixth.
2. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 added federal standards while leaving the administration of elections with the states.
3. Most of these reforms answered a specific failure, so a rule that looks like clutter is often the memorial to an earlier abuse.
4. The system is decentralized by constitutional design, and its best laws have served access and integrity together.

What you can do: find out which office in your county runs your elections, look at the sample ballot and the rules for your next election, and ask that office how it maintains its voter list.