Voting Before the Secret Ballot

On 18 July 1872 ‘An Act to amend the Law relating to Procedure at Parliamentary and Municipal Elections’ received the royal assent. Known as the ‘Ballot Act’, this new law transformed at a stroke the nature and practice of British elections, perhaps more radically than any other piece of legislation before or since. By replacing the public ‘open’ method of voting with paper ballots, the Act, declared the government, would ‘secure alike the independence of the voter, and the tranquillity and purity of elections’. Its basic principles underlie the procedure of UK democracy to this day.

Prior to the ballot, parliamentary elections in the UK were theatrical affairs, exciting and entertaining, but also pervaded with anger and violence. Once it became clear that a seat would be contested, a wooden platform, known as the hustings, was constructed in some central place within the constituency, surrounded by polling booths manned by clerks and agents of the candidates. The first task was the public nomination of candidates upon the hustings, in front of the entire community. Voting followed swiftly, usually the next day. The procedure was straightforward: voters entered their assigned booth, stated their name, address and employment and the name of the candidate for whom they wished to vote. This was recorded by the clerk, in full view of the candidates’ representatives. The atmosphere on election days was often tense and chaotic, with voters forced to run a gauntlet of cheers, jeers and threats, not to mention the occasional missile. Serious violence and even death were not unknown, with hustings sometimes overwhelmed by hired thugs or furious mobs. Running totals were kept and regularly broadcast to the crowds waiting outside. After the event, detailed results were frequently published in unofficial ‘poll books’, ensuring that an individual’s political choice would remain common knowledge long after the election was over.

By 1872 a series of reforms had substantially altered the polling process and standardised it across the country. A formal system of voter registration was introduced in 1832 and, with it, an increase in the number of polling places. By the 1850s the number of possible voting days had been reduced to one, down from an unlimited number before 1785. Yet the public nature of voting itself remained untouched. 

Paying for it

To its defenders, the public vote was key to politics in a free society. With non-voters enormously outnumbering the enfranchised, the vote was widely regarded as an individual privilege exercised on behalf of the entire community. For the philosopher John Stuart Mill, open voting encouraged ‘patriotism and the obligation of public duty’ in those who exercised it. Conversely, voting in secret was regarded as anti-social, allowing voters to act on personal motives without being held accountable for their actions. For some it stood in direct opposition to the personal liberty which they believed was special to the ‘English character’. As The Times declared in 1856, the ballot was:

utterly inconsistent with the publicity and self-respect that are essential to freedom … should the institution ever become possible here, it will be because we have lost those national characteristics which alone make freedom durable.

In truth, however, the staunchest defenders of open voting were members of the landed elite, concerned with maintaining their power – or, as they themselves described it, ‘legitimate influence’ – over an increasingly unpredictable and democratic electorate. In rural constituencies landlords often ordered their tenants to vote for their own candidates under pain of eviction, while during the 19th century these methods were adopted by wealthy businessmen, who used the power structures within their mills and factories to control the votes of their workers. 

This is not to say that open voting gave all the power to the ruling elite. Public knowledge of voters’ choices offered significant influence to community pressure. In Ireland, for example, the disenfranchised Catholic majority famously succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell elected in a by-election in 1828. More commonly, voters were able to extract a price for their support in the form of cash bribes, nepotism, or more general entertaining and ‘treating’. Expenditures of thousands of pounds were common, but sometimes the cost was much higher: a by-election in Liverpool in 1830 was alleged to have cost the two candidates together more than £100,000 in bribes, a sum described by one of the participants as ‘insanity’. In extreme cases, voters who held out until the last moments of a close-fought poll could find their votes worth £100 or more.

In light of these abuses it is not surprising that the arguments for the ballot were less theoretical and more practical than those against. Pointing to the general ‘immorality’ which characterised British elections, the ballot’s advocates argued that it was ridiculous to suggest that open voting created a healthy political environment. For George Grote, the classical historian and Radical MP, it was obvious that virtually no elector regarded his vote as anything other than a commodity to be bought or sold. ‘It is melancholy to confess’, wrote Grote in 1831, ‘that on this important topic the morality both of rich and poor has yet to be formed, nor can we hope ever to see it formed except by means of the ballot.’ It was also argued that through its secrecy the ballot would create a calmer, less theatrical process, thereby eliminating the main driver of public disorder: intimidation and mob violence. As another Radical politician, Richard Cobden, put it in 1851: ‘I want the ballot to protect everybody in their votes from the influence of everybody else.’ 

Get ballot done

By the 1820s the ballot had become a long-standing demand of British Radicals, who viewed it as part of their struggle against the landholding aristocracy. There was a vociferous campaign for its introduction during the reform crisis of 1831-32, led in Parliament by Grote, who continued to introduce motions and bills during the following years: in 1839, 216 MPs voted for it. Outside Parliament the cause was taken forward by the Ballot Society and the reform shaped one of the six points of the People’s Charter of 1838. Yet the ballot never commanded the kind of mass support that other political reforms did and remained divisive even among Radicals. One notable opponent was the Chartist leader and Northern Star editor Fergus O’Connor, who believed that secrecy ‘put a mask on an honest face’. He was successful in having it removed entirely from the Chartist petition of 1848. 

Despite the failure of these early campaigns, by the middle of the century the global context was trending inexorably towards reform. For all the claims of British uniqueness, the truth was that all democracies faced similar problems of violence and bribery and looked to the ballot to help solve them. Balloted elections as we would understand them were first adopted in revolutionary France and the United States, although these methods were rarely secret, often requiring the voter to sign the paper or use ballots issued by the candidates themselves. Secret voting was first introduced in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856 and by a range of European countries and US states over the following years. ‘Nobody who has inquired as to the proceedings in elections in America, in Switzerland, in France, in Spain’, declared Cobden in 1859, 

and compared them with the proceedings, the tumults, the violence, the bloodshed, the disgusting and odious corruption witnessed at our elections ... can doubt that as a moral engine, as a means of repressing these excesses, the ballot is the best resource.

These same trends also influenced UK elections outside of Parliament. During the 1830s ballot papers – though not cast in secret – were introduced in the UK as an option for some local government and poor law elections. They were also common at meetings of shareholders, clubs, associations and institutions; even the Carlton gentleman’s club, founded in 1832 as a bastion of anti-reform Conservatism, conducted its own internal elections by ballot. 

Yet in the event, the secret ballot was introduced to Britain not in response to popular demand, but through Liberal exasperation with the existing system. The general election of 1868 experienced some particularly egregious examples of corruption, which were slowly revealed over the following year, culminating in a parliamentary report which gave lukewarm support to secret voting. This moment was seized by the Radical leader John Bright, a longstanding ballot advocate; keen to include Bright in his Liberal government, Prime Minister William Gladstone agreed to add the ballot to his ministry’s long list of reforms. Although meeting with some vigorous opposition – the future Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury warned that it would dissuade ‘respectable’ voters and hand power to ‘busy bodies, enthusiasts and party wire-pullers’ – the Ballot Bill made largely untroubled progress through an unenthusiastic Parliament. The only major concession to the opposition was a stipulation that the Act should come up for review after eight years in operation. The final Act applied to all parliamentary and municipal elections, which in the latter case meant that women were among its beneficiaries, after the local government franchise had been extended to them three years earlier.

Tranquil triumph

At its core the 1872 Ballot Act consisted of two simple reforms. The first affected the nomination process, with candidates now required to submit their application in writing; before 1872 anyone could nominate an individual to stand in an election, with or without their consent. The second was the ballot itself, which brought with it another innovation: the polling station. Taken together, these changes completely transformed UK election procedures. The key elements of electoral theatre – public nominations and open voting at a central location – had gone. In their place came a bureaucratic and decentralised system of polling stations with no focal point for public disorder. Furthermore, the need to print and distribute ballot papers meant a much slower process overall. Instead of the following day, the law now allowed for voting to happen up to six working days after nomination. The rapid, hectic elections of previous years were thus abolished forever.

The 1872 Act established a specific layout for ballot papers which remains largely unchanged to this day. Candidates were listed in alphabetic order, giving their full name, address and ‘description’, which in practice meant title or occupation. Voters were to take the paper to a secluded compartment, mark it with the pencil provided; place it, folded, into the ballot box, ‘and forthwith quit the polling station’. (Why a pencil? Because wet ink could inadvertently mark another part of the ballot when folded – an especially common problem in the days of inkwells.) The greatest difference from the ballots papers of today was that no party names, slogans or emblems were allowed to appear on them.

Anxious politicians did not have long to wait to see the reform in action. The first balloted parliamentary by-election was held a month later, in August 1872 at Pontefract. The election drew so much attention that virtually every hotel in town was booked up by journalists and party agents keen to witness the process first-hand. Despite a few teething troubles – notably the procedure for helping illiterate voters held up proceedings – the result was regarded as a triumph. The nomination process was described as ‘tranquil’ and the polling, reported one local paper, was ‘conducted with a quietness that is really marvellous … there has been no disorder in the town, and a surprising stillness is maintained in the vicinity of the polling places’. As a unique touch, the ballot boxes were sealed with stamps of liquorice provided by a local maker of Pontefract cakes.

This new-found polling day calm was not a one-off. At the November local elections, the first nationwide test of the Act, newspapers up and down the land reported quiet streets and orderly queues of voters. The riot and corruption of the open hustings had disappeared forever.

If polling day calm was the most obvious benefit of the ballot, in other ways the reform did not live up to the hopes of its promoters. Violence was not abolished by the ballot, but instead shifted to campaign events which continued in the old theatrical tradition. Bribery also quickly adapted, as candidates switched from buying votes to buying turnout, for example by providing lavish meals and entertainment for voters. Similarly, some landlords simply negated the ballot by barring individual tenants from voting at all, or employing collective punishment upon villages that did not support their chosen candidate. It was not until the more comprehensive Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act was passed in 1883 that electoral malpractice was seriously reduced.

The ballot had a similarly mixed impact on electoral politics. It could be a potent weapon on the side of the weak. For the first time, miners in England, nationalists in Ireland and crofters in Scotland could elect MPs to represent their own interests. Nevertheless, despite hopes that secret voting would usher in a Radical triumph, the 1880s and 1890s witnessed a period of Conservative electoral domination under Lord Salisbury, a man who had fought the ballot to the last ditch.

Shortcomings

In the UK the core features of the Ballot Act have undergone few significant changes since 1872. Political party names were finally allowed on voting papers in 1969. However, with little regulation the problem of misleading descriptions became significant, most famously in 1994 when a candidate standing as a ‘Literal Democrat’ was accused by the Liberal Democrats of causing them to miss out on a European parliament seat. The 1998 Registration of Political Parties Act closed this loophole by creating a formal register of political parties, while also allowing emblems to appear on ballot papers, though only in black and white.

In this anniversary year, the Ballot Act has received a fresh reform, in the shape of the Conservative government’s Elections Act. Among the many elements of this controversial law, voters will be required to display photo ID in British polling stations (ID has been necessary in Northern Ireland since 1985). Framed by the government as the first update to polling security since 1872, the Act’s furious reception from groups who believe it will reduce access to democracy demonstrates how debates around electoral integrity remain live 150 years later.

Conversely, the Elections Act’s focus on the individual voter serves to illustrate how the Ballot Act helped create a new consensus about democracy in Britain. By moving voting from the public into the personal sphere, the ballot dealt a mortal blow to the notion that political choice should be dictated by ‘legitimate influence’ or community pressure. In so doing it allowed the language of politics to evolve from one defined by privilege to one of rights, embracing first household suffrage and, finally, ‘one person, one vote’.

Peter Keeling holds a PhD in modern British history from the University of Kent.