Might Cleaning Up Elections Keep People Away from the Polls? Historical and Comparative Perspectives
| Published date | 01 January 2002 |
| Author | Frederic Charles Schaffer |
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512102023001004 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Might Cleaning Up Elections Keep People Away
from the Polls? Historical and Comparative
Perspectives
FREDERIC CHARLES SCHAFFER
ABSTRACT. Many democracies in the developing world have enacted
reforms to make their elections cleaner. It is often assumed that such
reforms will make elections more participatory. The reality, however, is
that we know little about the consequences of current reform efforts on
voter turnout. In examining both historical and contemporary cases, this
article identifies three mechanisms by which clean election reform today
might actually keep potential voters away from the polls: legal
disfranchisment, cutting out the go-between, and buying abstention.
Keywords: Disfranchisement • Electoral reform • Secret ballot
Turnout • Voter registration.
Introduction
Electoral fraud and manipulation afflict many democracies in the developing
world. In the 1990s, governments in at least sixteen of these democracies
implemented, or began to implement, significant clean election reforms.1It is
often simply assumed that such reforms will enhance electoral participation. The
reality, however, is that we know little about the consequences of current reform
efforts. At the same time, the history of clean election reform in established
democracies teaches us that simple changes in the administration of elections can
have a profound and detrimental impact on, among other things, voter turnout.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most important
electoral innovations was the secret ballot, championed by reformers as a means to
reduce bribery and intimidation. But the secret ballot had less salutary effects as
well. In the United States, Democrats in the South deployed it to depress the
turnout of illiterate voters, and thus keep Republicans and Populists from power.
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 69–84
0192-5121 (2002/01) 23:1, 69–84; 020424 © 2002 International Political Science Association
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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The goal of this article is to identify specific mechanisms by which electoral
reforms designed, or at least publicly promoted, to clean up elections in today’s
reforming democracies might also disfranchise, demobilize, or otherwise keep
potential voters away from the polls. For clues into how such mechanisms might
work, we will look to the experience of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century reform in Europe and the United States, about which much interesting,
and I believe pertinent, scholarship has been produced. As this article is intended
merely to propose a new set of questions for future research, I take the liberty of
presenting evidence on reform today that is more suggestive than definitive. In
what follows, I isolate three mechanisms for discussion: legal disfranchisement,
cutting out the go-between, and buying abstention.
Legal Disfranchisement
By legal disfranchisement I do not refer to the lawful deprivation of voting rights,
as happened, say, to blacks in apartheid-era South Africa. That type of
disfranchisement has little to do with cleaning up elections. I have in mind, rather,
disfranchisement brought about by the imposition of a new uniform legal
requirement, in the name of clean elections, upon people who differ in their
dispositions or abilities to comply with that requirement out of shame, laziness,
busyness, indifference, distrust, political conviction, lack of education, and the
like.
In late nineteenth-century Arkansas, the secret ballot was one such new
requirement. Of course in Arkansas, as in the South more generally, the secret
ballot was only one of several measures adopted by Democrats to disfranchise
black (and poor white) voters. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and
residency requirements were variously used as well (Kousser, 1974). But unlike
other measures, which disfranchisers justified publicly as devices to winnow out
“unfit” voters, the secret ballot was hailed, in Arkansas at least, as a mechanism to
protect vulnerable voters from intimidation.
Thus the Democrat-controlled Arkansas state legislature included a secret
ballot provision in a larger reform package, adopted in 1891, to calm public
indignation over a series of widely publicized electoral scandals. The new law
provided, among other things, for a uniform ballot and a prohibition against last-
minute changes in the location of polling places. Another section of the law made
it illegal for friends or party members to prepare the ballot of an illiterate voter.
Under the new disposition, only a precinct judge could mark the ballot, and then
only after all other electors had vacated the polling place. “Defenders of this
procedure,” remarked one historian, “argued that it assured secrecy for the
illiterates and freed timid Negroes from ‘bulldozing’ and coercion by arm-twisting
employers and aggressive politicians” (Graves, 1967: 212).
Newspaper accounts from the period reveal that the new secrecy provision had
less benign effects. Illiterate voters, finding the new system to be degrading and
alienating, stayed away from the polls. As one article appearing in the Pine Bluff
Eagle Press explained, when blacks “who could not read were told to go to the polls
and vote, the majority of them declined, some being distrustful of the judges and
others not caring to expose their inability to make out their tickets unassisted”
(quoted in ibid.: 213). In a state where 27 percent of the population was illiterate,
the new law thus had a profound impact. The number of votes cast in 1892 was 21
percent less than in 1890 (Heckelman, 1995: 111). While the white vote dipped
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