Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

One would not normally associate a manifestly discriminatory practice like the poll tax with a progressive reform like the introduction of secret ballots. But there are many aspects of secret ballots that defy conventional wisdom. Secret ballots were not a fixture of early American democracy. They were first introduced in Kentucky in 1882, with South Carolina representing the last state to adopt them in 1950. Secret ballots were implemented to encourage voting by making the system fairer. They certainly succeeded in this among many voters, who could finally vote without fear of offending or angering anyone by their choice.23

But overall, secret ballots had the opposite effect than intended—voting participation fell by an average of 4 to 5 percentage points when secret voting was introduced.24 This can partly be explained by a more nefarious purpose for which secret ballots were used. As historians have noted, southern Democrats used the secret ballot “to depress the turnout of illiterate voters, and thus keep Republicans and Populists from power.”25 This was accomplished by switching the type of ballot simultaneously with the introduction of secret voting. Before the secret ballot, voting was as easy as selecting a colored card that represented a political party. But afterward, party names were written out on the ballots, thus making it more difficult for illiterate citizens to vote.26 However, this only explains a small part of the drop in voting caused by the secret ballot—only a few percentage points of eligible voters were functionally illiterate, and many of them didn’t vote even before the secret ballot’s introduction.27

Much more significantly, secret ballots lowered voting rates in a beneficial way—they helped to reduce vote buying. With secret ballots, the practice of paying people to vote for a certain candidate became less useful, since it was difficult to verify for whom a person voted.28 And when people stopped getting paid for voting, they voted less often.

Literacy tests arrived later than secret ballots. Nineteen states eventually instituted them, with nine of them adopting the requirement after 1900. Before casting a ballot, prospective voters were usually required to read some common document such as the U.S. Constitution.29 Although literacy tests are commonly associated with the South, a majority of states with literacy tests—eleven of them—were in other regions: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

For decades, literacy tests had no discernable effect because illiterate voters and poor African Americans were already discouraged from voting by the poll tax.30 From the 1930s to the early 1950s, however, southern states began phasing out the poll tax. In need of a new method to keep African Americans from the polls, southern state officials began subjectively administering literacy tests to achieve this goal. Literacy tests reduced voting in southern states that had them by an estimated 6 percentage points in 1948.31 These tests helped to keep Southern Democrats in office until the tests were eliminated in all nineteen states by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Despite the exploitation of literacy tests for these ends in the mid-twentieth century, however, it was the timeworn poll taxes and secret ballots—not literacy tests—that historically had the biggest effect on voting results in the south.

Voter Fraud

Every honest person wants national elections to be fair and accurate. In the United States, we have adopted all sorts of regulations to encourage voting and to ensure the integrity of the electoral process, including ID requirements, absentee ballots, pre-election voting, voting by mail, and registration procedures and deadlines. Some of these measures are controversial, with critics contending that they actually discourage voter turnout or increase voter fraud. These critics have a point: from a basic economics perspective, if we make voting more “costly” by wasting voters’ time in fulfilling onerous regulations, we can expect that fewer people will vote. However, a comprehensive study of voting regulations leads to a different conclusion; while a few regulations do indeed raise the likelihood of fraud, most of them increase turnout by instilling confidence in the voting system.

Poll taxes indisputably lowered voter turnout—in many places, that was their main purpose. But the effects of regulations meant to decrease fraud are less clear. These are geared toward a legitimate purpose, for electoral fraud remains a serious concern in the United States. Cities such as Philadelphia, for example, have become so notorious for voting fraud that the old mantra “vote early and often” seems to have become the city motto.32 In one particularly egregious case in that city, Democratic poll watcher Fani Papanikolau—who was actually a New Jersey resident—voted over and over again by assuming the identity of dead people. Papanikolau was ultimately indicted on over one hundred counts of election fraud and forgery.33 Similar cases have been found in Atlanta,34 while voter registration rolls in St. Louis are so out of date that people’s names were used to vote up to ten years after their death.35

While Florida is best known for allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the 2000 presidential election, the state has long suffered from serious electoral fraud. In the 1997 Miami mayoral election, thousands of fraudulent absentee ballots changed the election’s outcome.36 The following year, out of 8.1 million registered voters, Florida officials found that 17,702 were deceased, 47,000 were registered to vote at multiple locations, and 50,483 were convicted felons with no right to vote.37 These problems are also found in other states, some of which have jurisdictions that show more registered voters than there are people. 38 The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, the author of a book on electoral fraud, has even speculated that the close 2006 Senate elections in both Montana and Virginia—and thus control of the Senate—were likely determined by voter fraud.39

This kind of fraud is enabled by certain voting regulations meant to increase turnout. For example, absentee ballots make voting more convenient for those outside of their voting district, but they are also “notorious” sources of voter fraud.40 The Election Assistance Commission reported in 2006 that “there is