BackStory; Early and Often: Voting in America

This is backstory with us, the American History Guys. I am Peter Ono of the 18th Century Guy. I'm Ed Ayers, you're not the Century Guy, and I'm Brian Ballot, the 20th Century American History Guy. We thought November was never going to get here. I mean, two years of campaigning, debating, co-watching, horse racing, all that stuff. And after all of that, we're left with this odd phenomenon, the undecided voter. How can anybody be undecided, Ed? Now, if you happen to be one of those undecided voters, really, don't take it personally. It's just that a historian is kind of confused by that concept because for a long time in American history, that would have been an oxymoron to be a voter was to be decided. In the old days of colonial America, you made your choice and you stuck with it. Peter, you're an early American history expert. Am I wrong?

You're absolutely right, Ed. Let's put ourselves in the picture. We're in Virginia. It's one of those elections for the House of Burgesses. And remember now, there weren't many elective offices in colonial Virginia. It was the big one. Who are the two guys going to be that we're going to send down to Williamsburg to represent our county. And I emphasize county because there's one place to vote. That's the county courthouse. Understand, courthouse is where you go to smoke, drink, and be rowdy. And elections are a public event. A little noise, please. Let's have some over-talking because it's loud here at the county courthouse. I can't hear you, Peter. Well, people have gathered around. And we got a couple of candidates in there standing up there. I'm going to hear you. Those are going to come. They are going to publicly declare for who they are voting in front of the entire rowdy crown. So everyone knows how you vote. Yeah, they know where you stand. That's right, because you go up there and you declare who you're for, then the county clerk is going to say, so and so votes for so and so.

So and so votes for the Jefferson. And then very frequently that candidate is going to step up and say, well, thank you for voting for me. My surprise, sir. And then perhaps there'd be some treating. You know what treating this guy is? It's when the candidates pass out the booze. In other words, you're not doing this kind of silent thing where you're going into some kind of penitential beef where you're you and your God and your candidate get together and decide who's going to win. No, you're out there in public. It's a very public thing. And it is loud. Well, each week on backstory, we rip a topic from the headlines and we explore the history of that topic. This week, obviously, our topic is voting. How did Americans use to elect their leaders? What do the founders think democracy was all about? All those reforms we put in place? Did they really improve things? And if things were actually improved, outcome, so few people are voting. So now we've heard all about those elections

back in Peter's era in the 18th century. Surely if we go into the modern 19th century, things would have improved after a century of practicing democracy. Maybe a hundred years later, things would be better. But in fact, if we check in on Election Day, in the 1880s and 1890s, we see that there's even more lying and cheating and stealing than there was back in Peter's time. It was a time, kind of like some other time you may have heard, when national elections hinsed on the finesse of margins, and so could easily be swung one way or another by well-executed shenanigans. But whereas these days, campaigns are all about personality in the gilded age, it was all about the party. You're not voting for William McKinley. You're voting for the grand old part of the GOP. The party that saved the union, the party that will protect you from treason. Or you're voting for the party of liberty and personal choice, the democratic party, or the party of moral ideas on the one side and the party of personal liberty on the other. That's Mark Summers, a historian at the University of Kentucky

who's written a lot about the high jinx in American politics, especially in the gilded age. And he's referring, of course, to the Republicans, what he calls the moral ideas, guys, and the Democrats, the liberty lovers. You can have Indiana governor shouting right openly there. Every man that shot against you during the war was a Democrat. The man that killed Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Everyone who hunted slaves with bloodhounds was a Democrat. Soldiers, every scar you have upon your body was given to you by a Democrat. And that's so-called waving the bloody shirt, right? Well, yeah, but it's done on the southern side too, you know, except you don't wave the bloody shirt in terms of, you know, treason. You wave it in terms of, if you don't vote the Democratic Party, you're going to have Negro rule. You want Negro sitting next in the school, right next to your daughter. Do you want a Negro share of hailing you and do you want Negroes on juries? That's what the Republicans are going to do. Vote the white man's ticket, vote the white supremacy ticket. Let me ask you, if you knew that the issue was saving your country, wouldn't it be worth buying a few voters

if the real issue was whether the country was going to be destroyed or not? So the fact is that they really were unembarrassed about violating what an earlier generation, the founding generation would have defined as purity at the polls. Oh, the politicians were unembarrassed about it as they would say one of them wrote in a letter, sometimes you have to fight Satan with his own weapons. So tell me about Satan's weapons, Mark. But what were the techniques that they would use to trick their way into victory? Oh, number one, you buy voters. That's a simple kind of thing. Voter costs you $2, maybe $250. Maybe if there's a lot of competition as high as 10 bucks, simple as that, the $2 bill, it's main uses for vote buying. I mean, that's when it gets as big pull out. There's some people that might be Republicans, for example, who they would never vote anything but a Republican ticket. But if you don't buy them, they're not going to vote at all. And you're going to need their votes. And buying votes is really not all that hard to do because in the days before the secret ballot,

each party prints its own ballot, which means that what they do is the party organizer will put the ballot into your hand, along with the money, or along with the IOU or the promissory note. And when he sees you go into the polls and put that paper ballot in through the slot, he knows he's got his money's worth. Now sometimes, however, that's straightforward approach and just buying an election doesn't work. And people have to resort to more imaginative means. But some of those have looked like. Yeah, colonization, for example, colonizing. Now remember, up to the 1880s, states vote on different days. So you could vote in Pennsylvania in October and cross the border into New York and vote there in November. Simple enough, or voted Indiana in October and already voted up in Maine and Vermont in September. That's an easy thing. So you don't have enough votes. A person who's smart can bring them across. Now all this sounds like these are acts of what we might think of today as a corruption that actually involved the voters themselves

in a very explicit way. But was there not back room, chicaneery, that was violating the wills of the voters? Yeah, boss Tweed of New York City, if you have any hall in the 1870s, when he was put on the witness stand once and ask about vote for it, said it wasn't the voters that made the result. It was the counters that made the result. Let me give an example of, say, Louisiana. Americans like to vote. Most elections, you can get a turnout, even a governor's election of 70, 80, 90%, but in Louisiana, in a normal election year on the Gilded Age, you can get turned out since some counties of 112 to 140%. Boy, they like to vote. But you know the best thing about it? This is usually, we'll get a turnout overwhelmingly democratic with this 112, 140%, in a parish that has nothing but black Republicans in it. How did they do it? They did it because they put in the kind of votes and returns they wanted to put in. Can we say that one party cheated more

than another back in the Gilded Age? Oh, golly, in Indiana, in Delaware, in New Hampshire. No, no. Each side will buy wherever it can buy votes. It's utterly unscrupulous, utterly dishonest. But you go in, down on the south, and almost all the cheating, almost all the swindling is democratic cheating. They're doing it quite deliberately because in states, whether it's a black majority, which means a Republican majority, or enough white and black votes to vote Republican, the only way you can win is by wholesale cheating, by owning the election officials, by intimidation, by threats, you dynamite their newspaper office before election day, you take out a few other organizers and give them a floggy with barbed wire, you fish three or four black Republicans out of the buy you, maybe a week before the Louisiana election. The other ones, they're going to get the message, they're not going to show up to vote. I mean, you go to Mississippi, you go to a black precinct. I mean, this happens in 1875. The blacks are getting ready to vote, a group of white armed riders with ropes over their arms come up and they say, wind the poles open,

and they say, not for five minutes on they say, then the shooting won't begin for five minutes and ride off. How many people do you think are going to show up to vote there? Not many. Not many, which is one reason why say in a county like Yazoo County, there's about a thousand Republican voters in one year and the next year, there's seven. Now, are there no disinterested reformers who are going to come here and say, sure, what do they propose as solutions to this problem? Well, they had a lot of good solutions. Number one is the Australian ballot, secret ballot, which is what the Australian ballot is, is a ballot that we have today, one that's printed by the government that has all the parties on it, that they'll be handed, you know, at the polling place. Before that, what you have is a paper ballot. It may be, you know, about the size of a half sheet of note paper. And on it, it lists one party's candidates. And that party passes that ballot out. I mean, Democrats, if they want to goal a litter at black voters in the South, you know what they do? They can print a ballot that has Lincoln's face on the top. Well, Lincoln's a Republican hero.

Of course, blacks are going to vote that ballot. They can't read that all of the electors down there on that ticket are Democratic electors. Between 1888 and about 1892, about half the states in the country get the secret ballot. And then, sure, the guy can put a gold, you know, eagle coin into your hand for a buck or something like that. But he doesn't know he's going to get his money. He's worth does he? And so the result led into a golden age of America, right? The golden age of honesty that we're in today. Oh no, no, no. If you have a secret ballot, it means that most people who are a literate probably aren't going to be able to vote because they can't read the names. One of the magic things about the secret ballot down South is that for a lot of Southern white politicians, this is the way to keep blacks from voting because if maybe 30, 40, 50% of blacks have not had schooling in our illiterate, they won't be able to figure out which party is which and the Democrats will. It's meant deliberately to cut out the vote. But the other thing is a lot of vote buyers

actually are people of honesty and they figure if I've been paid money to vote for the Democratic tick and by gum, I'm going to carry through. Vote buying go, he went on and Kentucky all the way into this century and beyond. We've had politicians prominent up and coming good politicians who were implicated and jailed for being an accomplice in this kind of vote buying. The secret ballot doesn't really cure it. Or I could pick county in Indiana and show you the same kind of thing or in Ohio and show you the same kind of thing. It didn't clean it up entirely. Is there any part of the United States that's immune to this, Def Mar? Oh, no, no, no, no. I don't think there's ever been an honest state in the union. I don't really think so. When the advantage is big enough, I think most voters are honest. I think most politicians are honest. Shocking is that maybe to say, but there's always the people out there that want to give themselves an edge and they'll get it if they can. Mark, thank you so very much for joining us today.

My pleasure. It's Mark Summers, who's a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. He's the author of Party Games, getting, keeping, and using power in Guilded Age politics. We have to take a quick break. And we get back. We'll hear from some of you listeners. If you'd like to hear a longer version of Ed's interview with Mark Summers, you can find it on our website. That's at backstoryradio.org. Leave us a comment and tell us what you think. More backstory coming up in a minute. Don't let me fall. I heard a magic start forever. Don't let me fall.

Don't let me fall. Don't let me fall. I heard magic start, forever. Don't let me fall. Don't let me fall. Don't let me fall. I heard magic start, forever. I heard magic start, forever. I heard magic start, forever. I heard magic start, forever. I heard magic start, forever. This is backstory. I'm Peter Renov. I'm Ed Ayers. And I'm Brian Ballot. We're talking today about the history of voting in America. Before the break, historian Mark Summers was talking about the introduction of the secret ballot in the 1880s or as it was called at the time the Australian ballot. But there's one thing that he didn't tell us. Why was it called the Australian ballot? Fortunately, we have someone here on the line with us this very second who can answer that question. Collar, would you please identify yourself? My name is Peter Brent. And where are you calling us from today, Peter? I'm in Canberra, Australia, the capital of Australia. So Peter, why is it called the Australian ballot?

It does involve kangaroos and things, but no, seriously, somebody thought of it in January 1856 in Melbourne in Victoria. A guy called Henry Samuel Chapman is credited with coming up with the idea that we don't know the actual details. This was when the Australian colonies were just achieving self-government and they all decided to, rather than open voting, which was the way it was done in England, to have the secret ballot. And this was the way elections were conducted in many states in America and some European countries at the time. So why do we call it the Australian ballot? Why do we give that away? I mean, we had some states using it. Come on, Brian B. Generous. Because we invented the government supplied ballot paper with the candidates name on it. Those states in America and those European countries had a fairly casual sort of secret ballot where people would just bring along their own bits of paper

and the only difference between it and open voting was that you didn't write your own name on it. Yeah, so you came up with the winning device. Well, yes, it's the one that's stuck anyway. I mean, the interesting thing is that this was the way Australians thought at the time, if something's desirable, well, the government's going to step in and take control and maybe boss people around and tell them this is for your own good. And that's different, of course, to Ethos in America, which was more about keep governments off our back. Yeah, if we want votes, we'll buy them. Yeah, absolutely. All right, thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. That is Peter Brent, a doctoral student at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. And we're very grateful for you helping us out today, Peter. This type of election employs the Australian ballot, which means you vote in secretly on uniform ballots provided by public authority. When you have finished marking your ballot, bolded so that no one can see how you have voted. If there is an official statement...

We're getting to the phones now. Some of you have already emailed us with your questions and we've invited you to talk with us on the air. Peter, you have a caller queued up for us? I do, Brian. It's Dan, calling from Durham, North Carolina. Dan. Hey, how's it going? Well, pretty good. How about with you? Excellent. I was wondering, you know, through American history, what has voter turnout been like? I know that always ends up being a big deal in elections. I think right now it hover somewhere around 50% and it's kind of been on the decline. But I wondered historically, what kind of factors have influenced it? Well, I'm going to jump right in here because I speak for the time of the 19th century when voting turnout was at its all-time peak. So this is Ed, the 19th century guy. Almost communistic leaders. Yeah, that's because some of Ed's voters turned out more than once as it turned out. They rose from the grave sometimes. But we do have a sort of a paradox that in the 1880s and 1890s, in the time that, you know,

fifth graders would have the hardest time naming the list of presidents in a row. And not just fifth graders, Ed. Well, I just didn't want to pick on them. But, you know, I thought maybe they weren't as many fifth graders listing to the show and I wouldn't offend anybody else. But, you know, the sort of obscure time in American politics where it doesn't seem like anything happened. We weren't at war, you know, the issues we look back on now. What were the big deal? The tariff, whatever. And yet you were having over 95% of people voting sometimes. Hey, that's different. This is important. Come on. Oh, I'm sorry. You know, that was just a gratuitous swipe. It was. I take the tariff very seriously. So I take that all back. So Ed, why was it so much fun to vote back then? It was often because it was like a big frat party. There was a lot of drinking. It was all guys. It was basically like making teams. You'd have these contests who can make the coolest flags and uniforms and, you know, all these different kinds of public display. Ed, if I could just add also those teams were really evenly matched. Yeah.

So turn out, you know, it's like a good football people show up at a football game that they think is going to be close. Yeah. And it's like they were giving away free items at every football game too. That's really close. Because it's football heads. It's football heads. Exactly, but this time you were getting jobs, you know, or turkeys, you know, or hams or things like that. And then we think of the progressive era, right, which is all about direct democracy and direct election of senators and all these kind of government. Good government. Good government. Yeah. And what happens is it begins to kill off voting pretty precipitously. Yeah. So I want to throw the ball to Brian to say why the heck did the secret ballot and increased literacy and women's suffrage? Why has it actually not helped voter turnout? Well, Ed, let's take something like the kind of people who worked in government. Those machines produced lots of patronage jobs, lots of jobs that were handed out as a direct result of being connected with the political party. And that meant, you know, you're someone

and your family might well get a job as a result of it. Well, that got replaced by civil service jobs where people took tests and were hired based on merit. So there was a much less of a direct connection between turning out to vote and getting a job. And here's one of the great ironies of American history. People didn't see the connections between voting and how it would change their lives, even as the national government, especially started making all kinds of decisions that influence people's lives much more, or literally war and peace, if you count World War One, World War Two, et cetera. Well, maybe the selection will be different, right? I think it will be, actually, if the game's going to be close, people want to see it. Well, thanks a lot. All right. Great question. Thanks so much for going. Thank you. Let's go to another call, Peter. Next up, we have Keith from Northville, Michigan. Keith, welcome to backstory. Hi, guys. How are you? Good. Excellent. Good. I know your topic today is a voting which is sometimes included cheating. So here's my question.

The white only property owner voter was cheating in our view today, and that a system denied other Americans their natural rights. But representation also included non-voters. How did the non-voters feel about this, they in an 18th century, were they insulted to the point of petition or are they more inspired to become property owners if they were white? Well, that's a terrific question. And the key term that you used is natural rights. That is, we now know that we're just as good as everybody else. And we think of ourselves all as having rights. Now, what does that mean? It means that we're independent. We have a will of our own, and we should be able to express it. And no government is legitimate that doesn't build on the consent of people like us. Well, that's not true in the 18th century. And what you have to understand is that when Jefferson says all men are created equal, that's not the common sense of the thing. In fact, there are some who own and some who are owned. To use the most extreme case. But the large majority of the population,

even if it's not enslaved or in some form of servitude, is dependent. That is, lacks an independent will, and therefore a civic voice. Nobody on the outside, or very few people, I should say, would feel that there was anything unnatural or wrong about that. For instance, if you were a child, a wife, a mother, a member of a family, you would think that your husband, father, the householder, patriarch, he's the one who should represent the family in public life. It was actually decades really before any kind of strong movement began to expand the franchise. So what caused it to change then? Why did we have to get democracy if we'd only wrote the Constitution 30 or 40 years earlier? I think you're getting right at it. A knee-jerk reaction is to say, well, it was this idea of equality. It had revolutionary implications. And you're saying, well, why did it take so long to have revolutionary implications?

And I think really the best answer, it's going to seem evasive to you, but the best answer is that the society itself has to change in fundamental ways, so that a notion of the equality of all adults, including women, that's not something that would naturally be deduced from the kind of world that the revolutionaries lived in. They lived in a world of families. They lived in a world in which there weren't a lot of equals. You know, you could say that we had a kind of a deal. Take this notion of the independent property holding householder who gets to vote. Well, the deal is everybody gets to be like an independent householder in the political realm. That's part of the deal. The rest of the deal is property is going to be protected. And which I think that's the short version of American history right there. But property and property rights, of course, are the basis of inequality in America and everywhere else. So think about it. We got an equal and unequal society

and those two ideas are in constant tension conversation. But really what you're saying, Peter, is that they were in less tension originally. And property was unequally divided. And votes were unequally divided. Yeah, and that was a stable synthesis. So it lasted for a long time in colonial America. This is a really crucial point, I think, because I'm a school teacher. And I think the way that a lot of the textbooks frame this time in history, a lot of it found the emphasis of the freedoms. You know, you think about people dying for freedom as the way that's often portrayed in the Revolutionary War. It sounds more like they were dying for maybe property rights. It was more... A lot of it was based on the money and the taxation issue. Keith, what a vulgar conclusion to reach. I didn't say that. People might die for family. What do you think about that? They might die for their community. I don't think these people are better or worse than we are. They live in a different world.

But what I am saying is that the modern idea of equality, which we take for granted, is not generally embraced at this period. I guess the argument would be, wouldn't it, if we wanted to take the positive view, is that the founding documents created the context into which America grew? Well, Keith, thank you so much for your question. Thanks very much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Listeners, we want to know what you think about all of this. When it comes to voting, how close have we come to achieving what the founding fathers set out to do? Send us your thoughts. Our email address is backstory at virginia.edu. Or you can do it the old fashioned way. Our phone number is 888-257-8851. We've got another call, guys. Leah from Princeton, New Jersey. Leah, welcome to Backstory. Hi, thank you. I'm really interested in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, designed to protect the voting rights of American citizens, especially in the deep south states where disenfranchment was rampant and oftentimes violent.

Now, since then, Congress has fought pretty vigorously to extend some of these acts with certain congressional members fighting just as vigorously against extending some of these acts. So my question is to what extent does this Voting Rights Act actually improve the voting statistics for African Americans? Are laws or acts like this still needed? Or are they remnants of the past? Yeah. Leah, this is the 20th century guy, and so I'm going to take a stab at your terrific question. Thank you. The simple answer is the Voting Rights Act, especially changed the voting scene in the United States, and especially the deep south dramatically. It didn't happen overnight, but it actually happened quite quickly. And certainly by the 1970s, blacks were registering and voting in portions simply unheard of. And all you need to do is look at the number

of African American officials who are soon elected, virtually every city and town, or most towns in the deep south, now have either had an African American mayor or an African American who has competed for that position. I'd agree that this has been an almost silent revolution in American political life that we seem to take for granted already. Think about why our southern states in play now for the first time since 1964 in the election of 2008 for the presidential election. Why is it that Obama is a credible candidate in Virginia because of black voters and all the work that's been done mobilizing them in the relatively few decades since the pivotal moments that you talk about. Yeah, and I do not mean, I'm sure Ed does not mean to suggest, that those who wanted to maintain old ways didn't push back and they pushed back really big time in the cleverest of ways.

And that's where the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act really came in because certainly throughout the 70s and even through the 80s, you had local districts doing all kinds of things to maintain white majorities. The most typical thing that they would do would be to annex a white part of the county right next to a city. This is what happened in Richmond when they annexed Chesterfield County. And often the Department of Justice and also we got to give credit to the Supreme Court here would step in and say no, you know, this was done intentionally not for reasons of city planning purposes, but it was done intentionally to dilute the value of black votes. Well, this is one of the things that in my line of work, I've been looking at extensively for the past couple of years. What is your line of work? I am finishing up a dissertation. You call that work?

Yeah. I'm finishing up a dissertation in history that looks at black participation in the Republican Party over the 20th century. Cool. What percentage of black voters now are Republican? In the last election there was actually a relatively high turnout of black voters. I think it was about 10%, which is... You don't really mean turnout. You mean percentage of black vote that went to Republican? Right. I think this election is interesting because right now the joint center is predicting that the Republican Party might get its lowest numbers since 1964. Is that the Obama effect? They're saying it's the Obama effect, but they're also saying you're not talking to me. We're not being included in the discussion of facts. Now, I want to point to something. One of the negative impacts of the Voting Rights Act. In many instances, we have created safe districts, districts that are absolutely going to elect

in African-American representative. And in my opinion, as much as I support the Voting Rights Act as important as it is, in my opinion, safe districts are bad for representation. Because whenever a representative knows he can count on a majority of votes, then he or she does not have to represent the true will of those people. They, in essence, get a free ride. And one of the real legitimate criticisms of the Voting Rights Act is it's contributed to creating too many safe districts. What's the incomeancy now? Is it 90 percent? Well, actually, it's in Congress, Peter. It used to be that high in Congress. But it's really been dropping pretty dramatically. And I have a feeling given what's happening these days with the economy. It may drop even more precipitously in this next election. Thanks for calling. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks, Lea. Bye-bye. There were those who said this is an old injustice.

And there is no need to hurry. But 95 years have passed since the 15th Amendment gave all Negroes the right to vote. And the time for waiting is gone. This law covers many pages. But the heart of the act is plain. Wherever by clear and objective standards states and counties are using regulations or laws or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down. And under this act, if any county anywhere in this nation does not want federal intervention, it needs only open its polling places to all of its people. Now just need to bane Johnson, like the sign of the Bloody Rocks Act, August 6, 1965.

We have to take another quick break. Remember, if you'd like to be a caller on an upcoming show, visit BackstoryRadio.org to see the topics that we're working on right now. Coming up, we'll take on the most unpopular part of popular elections that's the electoral college. Don't go away. You don't have to live next to me. Just give me my party. Everybody knows about Mississippi. Everybody knows about Alabama. Everybody knows about Mississippi. Come down! That's it! Production support for Backstory is provided by Caroline Feeney, Marcus and Carol Weinstein, J.M. Weinberg, Christian David Crow, Claire Gargall, and David Carly, and an anonymous donor. This is Backstory.

I'm Peter Onov. I'm Ed Ayers, and I'm Brian Ballot. If you're having trouble keeping us straight, just remember, the guy with the Southern Toang, that's a three-syllable word, that's Ed, our 19th-century guy, the guy with the northern twang, that's me, Brian, your 20th-century guy. And when you don't hear any twang at all, it's me, Peter Onov, 18th-century American history guy. Today, we're talking about the history of voting in America. In the first part of the show, we looked at what actually happens on Election Day, who gets to vote, how they vote, and in some cases, how those votes are actually manipulated by people running the whole Shebang. But there's still a big part of voting that we haven't talked about, and that's what happens after the votes are counted. When it comes to state local elections, the process is fairly straightforward. People vote, and the candidate with most votes wins. Ah, sure, there are some screwy rules here and there,

runoff elections, things like that. But basically, it comes down to one person, one vote. But when it comes to presidential elections, it's a whole different story. And if the details of that story are a little fuzzy to you, don't worry, you're not alone. You've got plenty of company, at least here in Charlottesville, Virginia. Are you planning to vote? Yes, sure. Of course. Once you cast a ballot, how does that elect a president? Yeah. Okay. Here we go. I guess he gets calculated and tall enough. I guess it counts towards the overall election status. Well, I hope now vote counts for the million that I vote for. It goes to the state, which then goes to the federal. To the electoral stuff like that. How does my vote help elect a president? It doesn't really. How does it elect a president? I imagine they all get counted up, added together, and the one with the most votes wins. What about that electoral college? Each state designated to populous, or something,

I'm really not sure. Now I'm sounding, am I right? Give me that again. I think it's somehow linked to the popular vote, but in a state, but not necessarily. I know it has to do with the red states, the blue states, and the gray ones, which are the hinged states, is that right? The swing states. The swing states. Ah, yes. I'm sorry. I don't know enough about it to talk to you about it. And then, they use the, what are the people that, the super delegates? I don't want to miss you. Well, guys, at least no one claimed to have graduated from that electoral college. Well, that's a little six quiz administered by our producer, Rachel Quimby, in downtown Charlottesville, there is a college, surprisingly enough. Guys, guys, guys, restrain yourselves. We've had a civics quiz. Let's have a civics lesson about it. How does this electoral college thing work? Well, Peter,

I'm going to ask you, I mean, you know, they did this back in your period. Yeah, fair enough. I like that. Well, first off, let's do the basic math. Take Delaware. Delaware is the smallest state in the original union, three little counties, dangling south of Pennsylvania, as you can see on your map, even today, those three counties constitute one state. That means two senators and one representative in the electoral college. You got the formula here. It's the number of representatives plus the number of senators. And those electors vote in turn when the college convenes in order to name the president. You are not voting for a president. You are voting for an elector. Sure. So let's take a state like Wyoming. All right. If you figure out how many people are behind each elector in Wyoming, it's going to be something like 250,000 people for each elector. If you take California,

it's going to be something like 600,000 people per each elector. So what that means is, you can have a swing of 300,000 votes between those two states. In the popular vote, that's a 300,000 advantage, but no advantage in the electoral college. So you have this situation, which has happened four times in history, 1824 or 1876. I think the third was 1888. And of course, 2000, where a candidate racks up the popular vote, but they don't win the electoral votes. Because those electoral votes are aggregated on the state level and the winner takes all. I mean, this is enough to make you wonder what the founders could possibly have been thinking when they came up with the system in the first place. Recently, I put this very question to Alexander Kesar in a story in it Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. What they were thinking about was getting out of Philadelphia at the end of the summer because it was hot and they had been there too long.

In the course of the summer and it does go on for the entire summer, they changed their decision about how to choose the president a bunch of times. The most frequent thing that they do is to say that the president should be chosen by the legislature in effect by Congress. So kind of what today we would call a parliamentary system, sort of. Something like a parliamentary system, they're uneasy about it the whole time. They're doing it. There is a thought that if we want the president to be able to be reelected, he should not be chosen by Congress because that would in effect make him subject to the caprices and manipulations of Congress. So how do you really have a separate branch of government in the executive? Exactly. So that's part of what they struggle with. A second option is election by the people. And that is something of a non-starter really because of the South.

I mean that if there had been popular election of the president, then the southern states would not have gotten any bonus in political power for their slaves. Yeah. And Alex, explain that to me, that bonus for their slaves. The slaves didn't vote, of course. So what would the bonus take in a way have been with a direct vote? Well, sure. Well, you know, I mean, earlier in the summer, one of the big issues that they settled had to do with slavery and had to do with small states and big states. And the way in which they dealt with slavery was what became known rather notoriously as the three fifths compromised. That slaves counted as three fifths of a person for determining how many members of Congress, Virginia or North Carolina, would get, it would be the white population plus three fifths of the black population. This obviously gave greater political weight to slave states than they would have had had slaves simply not been counted at all. It was a compromise between saying they shouldn't count and they should count entirely. Right.

So that if it had been a direct election, they would have lost that three fifths edge per slave. Right. Which would have been a very significant redistribution of electoral power among the states. But what about after the slaves were freed? I understand there's a really ironic twist to the Southern advantage here. Could you talk about that a little bit? There's a deeply ironic twist. The 15th Amendment has passed after the Civil War and African Americans are technically in franchise and for a period of 10 to 20 years, depending on the state, they do participate in elections and they do vote. And then they are deprived of their voting rights by the end of the 19th century. The ironic consequence of that is that they are counted for full representation in the selection not only of members of Congress but of electoral votes. Equal protection. Right. And yet they still don't vote. So the consequence of the Civil War and Reconstruction is what I've come to refer to when several things have written

as the five fifths clause. That's a good way to put it. You know, Southern states get full electoral power in national elections for their black populations but their black populations don't vote. You know, I actually went and played with a few numbers on this and you see things, for example, in 1910, there were more votes cast in New York and Pennsylvania, those two states alone, then there were votes cast in the entire South by a very large margin. And yet the South had twice as many electoral votes. Yeah. Now, it's truly remarkable and I was just looking at some data for another reason but I saw that as late as 1964, only 7% of the eligible African Americans were registered in the state of Mississippi, which just underscores your point about that entire population being represented in the number of electoral votes in Mississippi but only 7% of the blacks actually,

even being eligible to vote. It's truly remarkable. And it is a central fact of American political history for the first two thirds of the 20th century that we don't pay that much attention to. So let's move forward in time a bit. If I understand this correctly, the states themselves have always been able to decide how they will apportion their electoral votes. Is that correct? That's absolutely correct. The Constitution says very clearly that each state can choose electors in a manner that the state legislature shall decide. And how did they do that? Was it all or nothing from the very start? In the 1790s, there were three different ways. In some cases, the state legislatures by themselves chose the electors. No popular election will just do it. In some, they did it with what was called the quote's general ticket, which is what we think of as winner-take-all. Others did it by district. So winner-take-all, but now within the congressional district,

without a crossing state. Exactly. It was pretty much widely believed that the districting system was the most democratic, the most progressive, came the closest to expressing the will of the people. It certainly strikes me as the most representative. Absolutely. But when parties begin to form, what happens is that a certain partisan logic takes over, which is that if you have a party that is pretty sure to have a majority of a particular state, but not 100% of the vote, it becomes in the interest of the party, if you think the election is going to be close, to have the state legislature decide to do it by winner-take-all. And that's precisely what happened in the 1800 election, when Jefferson's backers in Virginia decided to do that, because in 1796, the federalists had gotten five electoral votes, I think it was, and taken them away from the Democratic Republic. So they decided to lock in that victory of sorts. Absolutely.

And then Massachusetts retaliated doing the same thing. And so that system is the one that we've inherited today. Is that correct? For the most part, I mean, in fact, I think maybe 48 of the states have winner-take-all rules? Yes. 48 states do winner-take-all mean in the Brasgar, the sole exceptions. There have been some states along the way over the last 200 years that have for some period of time departed from winner-take-all and then got clubbered back into conforming. But that's the system that we have today. And I should say, I'm a part of what's interesting. We have that system today, despite what is an extraordinary and long record of dissatisfaction with the Electoral College. Getting rid of the Electoral College has been the subject of more constitutional amendments introduced into Congress than any other subject. Wow. There have been well more than 600 by now, starting in 1815 and going until recently. The other remarkable fact is during the period

when we have public opinion polls, which is basically starting in about 1940, between two thirds and three quarters of the American people have always wanted to get rid of the Electoral College. They've always favored a popular vote. So to the billion dollar question, this is democracy, right? The reason we did not get a popular vote, a national popular vote, at least through the end of the 1960s, and we came very close in 1969 and 1970. The reason for that, again, had to do with race. It had to do with this Southern advantage to amend the Constitution, requires super majorities in Congress and among the states and the Southern states were absolutely opposed to any kind of national popular vote. Because they would lose that five fifths advantage that you talked about. Exactly. But if that has been one of the big stumbling blocks, and if, in fact, through actions like the Voting Rights Act and the whole mobilization of the Civil Rights Movement, we have dismantled that regime of Jim Crow,

not to mention slavery, then what is holding this up? I think we believe in one man, one vote, or as we'd say today, one person, one vote? I think we do believe in one person, one vote, but I think that political elites and political actors believe in one person, one vote, and I need to be sure that we win the next election. And, you know, we have this problem of, you know, fox guarding the hen house. And I think the major obstacle to this right now is that particular political parties, particularly state political parties, linked to national political parties, make the calculation that in a number of states, they have reliable majorities of, you know, 55 to 70% in a presidential election. Right. With that reliable majority, they can pretty much count on delivering the state's entire

block of electoral votes to their candidate and they don't want to give that up. It is a way in which the parties, in effect at this point in our history, having control of the electoral rules, are impeding what would be a truly democratic reform. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you joining us today. It's been a great pleasure from me, Brian. Alexander Kasar is a professor of history and social policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of the right to vote, the contested history of democracy in the United States, and he is hard at work putting out a new addition, which is going to bring that book right up to the most recent election. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you, Brian. When you pull down all my levers for the person of your choice, you're also choosing state electors who will have the final vote, they're calling the electoral college and they'll need to stipulate who the voters have selected to be the winner in each state. Well, guys, I really enjoyed that interview.

That was terrific. I always thought that this was all about protecting the small states. But after talking to Alex, I mean, what do you guys think? I didn't hear anything really about small states, at least in the 20th century. I have a philosophical question. I'd like to throw to you guys, though. I hear what you and Alex were saying about the preferability of district voting. But I want to know why the district is the unit that we should be thinking of as opposed to the state. What is it that makes a particular jurisdiction or unit or political society the proper context for discovering a majority? Why should a national vote trump state votes? See you're deeper than I am. I don't have any philosophical questions or answers. Well, I had to call it philosophical. So that you don't take it seriously. Well, Peter, I don't know. I think it's about the change in the presidency. And I think especially in the 20th century, the presidency has emerged as a national position,

the one position that represents all of the people. So I think that there is a lot to be said for voting on the local level for local offices. And there's a lot to be said for the constitutional structure of Senate and the House and we have our representatives. But when it comes to the presidency, the one place we use the electoral system is the worst place to use it because the presidency really has become the voice nationally of all of the people in reality. Yeah. Well, I just want to say finally and I'll give up on the philosophy that the principle here that you're advocating is that there is a nation and a national electorate and that we should think of it in unitary terms and I'm just raising questions about that. Yeah. Is there really A people who's will should be registered? Well, I don't know about that. Well, that's terrific question. In fact, far too good a question for us to answer. And that's why I want you out there

to visit our website, go to backstoryradio.org and tell us what you think. Is there really such a thing as a nation, as a national people? But we don't really care about your individual boat. We'll wait for your responses by the size of the state that you're from. Wherever you're from, however, you can find us at the same place, backstoryradio.org. And there you can sign up for our free podcast and for our weekly newsletter, which will let you know what shows we're working on and how you can take part in them. Thanks for listening and don't forget to vote. Backstory is produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Katherine Moore. Our engineer is Jamal Milner, Gavi Alter, composed our theme, and backstory's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Major production support for Backstory with American History Guys is provided by the David A. Harrison Fund for the President's Initiatives at the University of Virginia, the Perry Foundation Incorporated, and Carrie Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lions Brown Junior Charitable Foundation.

Peter Onaf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Brian Ballot is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.