Can You Keep a Secret?

This nonsense about not having the results of the election "that night" is so much bullshit. Prior to the mechanical voting machine, all ballots were on paper and counted by hand. It might be weeks before all were counted, especially in shitkicker states Out West. There's a reason the Electoral College meets in December.

The meeting of the electors takes place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December after the general election.

So, today's dustup is in Pennsylvania. Much like the hanging chad of 2000, again a bit of paper is the controversy.

"The Supreme Court was very, very clear in their ruling that the secrecy envelopes served an important purpose in ensuring the confidentiality of every ballot," said Straub. "The court has really made that official. We really don't have any plans to take that up again."

To be crystal clear: the Constitution says not one word about a secret ballot. Fact is, it wasn't until 1890-ish that such were used in the USofA. And it wasn't even our idea; we got it from the Aussies, then a shithole country.

Before 1890, partisan newspapers printed filled-out ballots which party workers distributed on election day so voters could drop them directly into the boxes. All of the states replaced these with secret ballots around 1890, popularly called "Australian ballots." They were printed by the local government and listed all the candidates impartially.

So, how long before the use of paper, but open, ballots replaced in-person voice voting? Again, paper ballots aren't in the Constitution, either.

In the United States, most states had moved to secret ballots soon after the presidential election of 1884. Kentucky was the last state to do so in 1891, when it quit using an oral ballot. But seven states did not have government-printed ballots until the 20th century. South Carolina created them in 1950 and Georgia in 1922.

Here's the story. One version, at least.

Yet voting remained quite public, Troy says, until the 1800s, as voters would sign their names under one candidate's name or another's on a public ballot.

When I was in school, it was taught that open, town meeting voting was still in use in small town New England, at least. Let's see if that's still true. Yes, yes it is.

When townspeople signed in, they received strips of mint green copier paper to hold aloft so volunteers called "tellers" could count the vote. Majority ruled, except in the few cases where a two-thirds vote was necessary. Few measures were controversial, so it was usually easy to gauge whether a motion carried by eyeballing the sea of green.

Not a voice vote, but open. No secrets in Westborough (located on I-495, then known as the Outer Beltway), which, by the way, was once a hot bed of computer high tech along with the famous Rte-128 'miracle days'; with green mint copier paper running the town. So, how long? Another recounting (he he) of 19th century voting methods.

But during the election of 1876, when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes faced Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, disputes over ballot counts in three Southern states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—delayed the results of the presidential race. Because Republican officials were in the majority on the panels that certified votes, they called for recounts and quickly declared that the states had actually gone for Hayes. Democrats contested the decision, going so far as to install alternate governors and state administrations rather than accept the legitimacy of the panels' decisions. These recounts triggered a crisis on the federal level as Congress debated who held final authority to certify returns, and a president-elect wasn't chosen for months. (Hayes won, but the vote-counting controversy was not without cost: The Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from Southern states, effectively ending Reconstruction.)

Ah, them Red States have been mucking with elections for at least a 100 years. So, there's never been anything magical about day-of-vote tallying. And remember, 1937 was the first year of January inauguration, which had been in March until then.