Structure, Process and Party: Essays in American Political History: Essays in American Political History by Peter H. Argersinger

Author:Peter H. Argersinger [Argersinger, Peter H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780873327985
Google: us6gDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 3905360
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1992-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Setting and Significance of Election Fraud

The new political historians seem to have a motive of their own in attempting to discount election fraud. This concern is most evident in the linked title of the Allens’ work, “Vote Fraud and Data Validity.” As the Allens write, “if elections were universally fraudulent, then the results of those elections are distortions of popular attitudes and of dubious validity. If election data are invalid, then the study of mass voting behavior is an exercise in futility.” Election fraud, in short, would dramatically undermine the value of a number of recent and impressive political studies based on analysis of election data. Richard Jensen agrees: if fraud and bribery determined elections, “then elaborate analysis of campaigns and voting patterns is an exercise in cynicism and futility.”8

To some extent, this concern is something of a misperception of the problem. Persistent electoral fraud poses a more serious obstacle to the traditional political historians whose analysis of election returns is limited to the simple dichotomy of victory or defeat. Their attempts to understand popular attitudes through such election analyses can carry little weight for the late nineteenth century anyway, for the period was characterized by high levels of partisanship and electoral competitiveness, and slight shifts in voting or turnout could turn whole elections. Democratic presidential candidate Winfield Hancock carried California in 1880 by 22 votes; at the same time Republican James Garfield carried the entire nation by only 8,000 votes. The quantitative analysis characteristic of the more sophisticated recent political studies, on the other hand, is based not on a dichotomous approach but on the use of descriptive statistics to analyze numerical data in terms of central tendencies, variances, and relationships among interval variables. And while “massive fraud” injects distortion into any analysis, the reality of election fraud in the Gilded Age was its strategic, not massive, nature. Only in those areas where relatively minor changes in the recorded popular vote would result in a different electoral outcome was there any incentive for fraudulent activity. As Senator George Edmunds remarked in 1889, “divisions of parties in several of the States have been so close that the purchase of a comparatively small number of votes could easily turn the scale … and it can be assumed to be an undisputed fact that such temptation has been yielded to by the active managing agents of both the great political parties.”9 Moreover, as a politician of a later period liked to note about his supportive father, Joseph P. Kennedy, he was willing to buy as many votes as necessary to win, but he was damned if he would buy a single extra one.

Second to the highly competitive nature of the political system in encouraging or permitting fraud was the structure of the election process. For most of the period there was no secret ballot. Instead voters used party tickets, printed by the different parties, containing the names of only their own candidates, and often varying widely in size and color. Distributed

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