|
From Party Tickets to Secret Ballots: The Evolution of the
Electoral Process in Maryland During the Gilded Age
PETER H. ARGERSINGER
In recent years, historians have significantly altered our understanding of
Gilded Age politics.
They have shifted the focus from party elites and national platforms to the
mass constituencies
of political parties and the social issues that animated them. They have
carefully specified
typologies of elections and subtly explored the creation of partisan
cultures.' But the
reexamination of the period's politics is incomplete without an analysis of
the role of the
electoral process itself. This subject involves a number of apparently
mundane matters, such as
selecting election officials, managing the polls, identifying qualified
voters, overseeing the mode
of voting, counting the ballots, and reporting the returns. But historians
must not regard
election machinery and electoral rules merely as givens. As politicians and
their opponents
recognized, the electoral structure both reflected and shaped politics and
had significant practical
consequences for voters, parties, and public policy. The evolution of the
electoral process in
Maryland during the Gilded Age demonstrates this important reality.
During the 1870s and 1880s the electoral process in Maryland was dominated
by the
political parries, operating within a loose legal framework that
facilitated electoral abuses and
controversy. In the first place, the election officials designated to
oversee the polls-three judges
and two clerks at each voting precinct-were appointed by partisan
politicians who had a vested
interest in the conduct of elections. In Maryland's counties the elected
county commissioners
selected such officials; in Baltimore, the responsibility was assigned to a
board of elections
supervisors appointed by the governor. Fairness was supposedly guaranteed
by mandating
that the party affiliation of one judge differ from that of his two
colleagues, but this
requirement was sometimes blatantly ignored or, more often, subtly
subverted. Partisan
Democratic supervisors, for example, frequently appointed as the putative
Republican judge
representing the minority party "Democrats in Republican disguise,"
Republicans hostile to the
ticket of their own party, or persons dependent on the goodwill of the
Democratic officials for
their occupation or liquor. As one Democratic elections supervisor admitted
in 1885, his
procedure was simply to appoint as judges "the two sharpest Democrats and
the weakest
Republican" he could find in each precinct. One Iabor candidate for the
Baltimore City
Peter H. Argersinger, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the
author of Populism arid Politics: William A#i-ed
Peffer arid the People's Party (Kentucky, 1974).
214
MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE
VoL. 82, No. 3, FALL 1987
|
