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National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico 1

Jonathan Fox

in Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico

This chapter analyzes persistent exclusionary electoral practices, using quantitative indicators of access to the secret ballot in Mexico's 1994 presidential election in rural areas. While the ... More

This chapter analyzes persistent exclusionary electoral practices, using quantitative indicators of access to the secret ballot in Mexico's 1994 presidential election in rural areas. While the opposition expected a re-run of the repertoire of fraud and manipulation that characterized the 1988 race, instead the state effectively deployed a range of levers of intervention in rural economic and social life that, in combination with the systematic lack of access to the secret ballot, reduced the ruling party's need to resort to fraud by inducing a widespread ‘fear vote’. This study draws on two previously unstudied data sets to estimate the degree of rural voter access to the secret ballot in the 1994 presidential elections, including a focus on opposition party oversight in indigenous municipalities in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas.Less

Organizational Politics under the Secret Ballot

Jeffery A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart III

in Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government

This chapter examines the organizational politics underlying speakership and other House officer contests during the period when elections were held by secret ballot—ending in 1837. It begins with a ... More

This chapter examines the organizational politics underlying speakership and other House officer contests during the period when elections were held by secret ballot—ending in 1837. It begins with a discussion of House organization from 1789 to 1811, a period characterized by weak political parties. In particular, it considers how the increasing partisanship in both House politics and speakership elections overlapped with changing norms of doing business in the chamber. It then looks at House organization during the years 1811–1837, a time when the formal structure of the House became more complex, the role of political parties was transformed, and the value of House offices, including positions like the Printer and Clerk, was much enhanced. The chapter shows that, prior to the use of public roll call votes for electing House officers, organizational politics unfolded around a variety of factors such as party, personality, and region.Less

The Convention Debates the Franchise

Dorothy Overstreet Pratt

in Sowing the Wind: The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890

This chapter examines the proposals before the convention delegates to disfranchise African Americans and some white voters. These proposals revealed a split among the delegates between paternalists ... More

This chapter examines the proposals before the convention delegates to disfranchise African Americans and some white voters. These proposals revealed a split among the delegates between paternalists and hardliners. While both groups were racists, the hardliners resisted any attempts to affect poor whites voting. The arguments began with issues of seating delegates from Bolivar County and Pearl River County, which would have affected the voting strength in both camps. The delegates went to committee to consider how to circumvent the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and then debated plural voting, secret ballots, the poll tax, and the understanding clause. Delegates made open pleas to compromise so to ensure success.Less

Burson v. Freeman

in The Constitution of Electoral Speech Law: The Supreme Court and Freedom of Expression in Campaigns and Elections

This chapter examines Burson v. Freeman, a case involving Tennessee's prohibition on “electioneering” (the solicitation of votes and the display/ distribution of campaign literature) within one ... More

This chapter examines Burson v. Freeman, a case involving Tennessee's prohibition on “electioneering” (the solicitation of votes and the display/ distribution of campaign literature) within one hundred feet of the entrance to the polling place on election day. Desiring both to advocate for a candidate “down the ballot” and to take advantage of the opportunity for last-minute campaigning, generally, Rebecca Freeman challenged this provision of the state's electoral code, alleging that the law violated her First Amendment right to communicate with voters in this quintessentially political environment. But for the state, while the grounds of the polling place may avail themselves to such activities 364 days a year, on election day they took on a different character, acting as a kind of embodiment of the premise of a “secret ballot”—meaning that, as the Court agreed, “campaign free zones” of this sort were necessary to protect voters and the process itself, in light of the increased potential for fraud, harassment, and intimidation where electioneering was allowed.Less

Disaggregating the secret ballot: electioneering and the politics of self-knowledge

Alexander Thomas T. Smith

in Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: Banal Activism, Electioneering and the Politics of Irrelevance

This chapter examines one important challenge for the Conservative Party's senior strategists as they sought to address their apparent ‘crisis’ of irrelevance: how to establish the voting intentions ... More

This chapter examines one important challenge for the Conservative Party's senior strategists as they sought to address their apparent ‘crisis’ of irrelevance: how to establish the voting intentions of potential supporters in what is otherwise an election by secret ballot. Working within various legal constraints, Conservative activists in Scotland developed a variety of strategies to render the Electoral Roll ‘transparent’ so that the political allegiances of thousands of local voters could be discerned (imagined). The chapter analyses two particular discursive artefacts – the survey and the canvass sheet – as performing a politics of self-knowledge for local Tories, and also considers the target letter, through which senior Conservatives hoped to achieve a positive outcome for local Party candidates in the forthcoming elections. Almost inevitably, however, Tory activists became preoccupied with the banal concerns of designing, producing and distributing these various discursive instruments, in addition to the most efficient bureaucratic means of managing the canvass and other data they generated.Less

Australia’s Electoral Idiosyncrasies

William O. Coleman

in Only in Australia: The History, Politics, and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism

The chapter brings out five features of the Australian electoral system: the original use of the secret ballot, preferential voting, compulsory voting, an independent Australian Electoral Commission, ... More

The chapter brings out five features of the Australian electoral system: the original use of the secret ballot, preferential voting, compulsory voting, an independent Australian Electoral Commission, and a rural and regional party of national significance. These peculiar institutions are a settled and unquestioned part of the Australian political framework. Most provide the occasion for national self-congratulation. This chapter surveys the origins of these particularities, and weighs what they actually indicate about the nature of Australian society, arguing that, contrary to the common Australian presumption, none of these constitute a proof of the strength of democracy. Australian democracy is, in fact, weak, and that the poverty of its parliamentarism is its key weakness.Less

Obama 2.0: Farewell to the Federal Campaign Finance System and the Secret Ballot?

Paula Baker

in Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008

This chapter takes a critical look at the internet fundraising techniques the Obama campaign perfected and argues that such techniques, combined with federal campaign contribution reporting ... More

This chapter takes a critical look at the internet fundraising techniques the Obama campaign perfected and argues that such techniques, combined with federal campaign contribution reporting requirements, pose an important challenge to political values that Americans have long embraced. Not only do the stunning amounts raised render obsolete the nation's four-decades-old system of public campaign financing; the fact that much of this money was raised from a large number of small donors, and that these donors can be readily identified in online campaign finance reports, challenges one of the most important innovations in the electoral process of the late nineteenth century, the secret ballot.Less

Responsible Government in an Imperial Context

Angela Woollacott

in Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture

In the Australian colonies—as in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand—the status of fully independent manhood with political rights was linked to the quest for colonial self-government. While they ... More

In the Australian colonies—as in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand—the status of fully independent manhood with political rights was linked to the quest for colonial self-government. While they looked to Canada for the model of self-government, Australian settlers and residents reconceived themselves as new actors on the imperial and global stage, forging democratic modernity through constitutional innovation. Responsible government constitutions for New South Wales, Tasmania, and Victoria were enacted in 1855, for South Australia in 1856, and for Queensland in 1859 when it separated from New South Wales. Other electoral reforms followed, especially male suffrage and the secret ballot. To explore the ways in which political reformers in the Australian colonies embodied imperial connections and experience, and were aware of questions of indigenous dispossession, this chapter considers Henry Samuel Chapman, one of the leading advocates of responsible government in the white settler colonies.Less

Introduction Politics as Unusual

Elaine Hadley

in Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain

This chapter presents an introduction to political liberalism in mid-Victorian Britain between the mid-1850s and the early 1880s. It describes Victorian society that mid-century political liberalism ... More

This chapter presents an introduction to political liberalism in mid-Victorian Britain between the mid-1850s and the early 1880s. It describes Victorian society that mid-century political liberalism ambivalently inhabits and its distinctive response to it. It discusses the form liberal individualism took and examines mid-century political liberalism's attempted revision of the public sphere. It explores the politics of liberal citizenship and the version of abstract embodiment in the political public sphere, the liberal citizen of the ballot box, a formation that emerges in the debates concerning secret balloting, which was made into law in 1872. It describes the mid-century political liberalism's deeply fraught relation to Ireland and in this way placing mid-century liberalism in its appropriate imperial context but also to a consideration of how mid-century liberal politics sought grounding authority in a precarious world of opinion.Less

Campaigning for a Jim Crow South

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

in Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy

In the interwar period, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, segregationists in the Deep South, capitalized on their enfranchisement to mobilize voters to shape the ... More

In the interwar period, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, segregationists in the Deep South, capitalized on their enfranchisement to mobilize voters to shape the system of Jim Crow at the polls. They encouraged women to uphold segregation through political parties, but their politics were as varied as the Jim Crow order they sought to serve. Ogden supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal for helping out Mississippians and for following the dictates of racial segregation. Cain opposed the Roosevelt’s expansion of social services and worked against the national party as a Jeffersonian Democrat. After Roosevelt’s proposal to re-organize the Supreme Court, Tucker organized a national anti–court-packing campaign, became a Republican, and lobbied for a secret ballot in South Carolina. These women criticized state-level officials for sacrificing conservative political principles for political gain and nourished the seeds of partisan dissent in the Solid South.Less

Secret Ballot

James W. Miller

in Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition

This chapter describes how Louisville interests tried to persuade the KHSAA board to return the state high school basketball tournament to Louisville, over the objections of Lexington supporters. ... More

This chapter describes how Louisville interests tried to persuade the KHSAA board to return the state high school basketball tournament to Louisville, over the objections of Lexington supporters. Louisville experienced racial unrest after African Americans boycotted a local movie theater that refused to admit blacks to a showing of Porgy and Bess, which featured an all-black cast. For this and other reasons, Lexington was the preferred site for the state tournament, and it took a secret vote of KHSAA board members to return the event to Louisville. The Lincoln players were hoping for a rematch with Louisville Central, but the Yellowjackets were upset in the regional tournament by Flaget High School. Flaget's African American point guard John McGill was also an outstanding tennis player who had spent the previous summer traveling as Arthur Ashe's doubles partner.Less