American History Hit - Elections Explained: A History of Voting

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

We have a constitutional right to vote in the United States ... don't we? Find out in this first episode of American History Hit's series, Elections Explained.Having correctly predicted every election since 1984 (except - arguably - 2000), Allan Lichtman joins Don to explore the development of the American right to vote,. When did we move from public to private voting? And where did the electoral college come from?Allan is a Distinguished Professor of History at the American University, Washington DC, and has been an expert witness in 100 Civil and Voting Rights cases. His books include ‘White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement’, ‘The Keys To the White House’, and ’The Thirteen Keys To the Presidency’, and his Youtube can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@AllanLichtmanYouTubeProduced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Welcome to Athens, the largest of the ancient Greek city states, where today we are voting on the election of a new magistrate. Or rather, they are voting, these thousands of property-owning male Athenians, all 18 and older, packed into this amphitheater for what is called Ecclesia, the gathering of the summoned.

These electoral assemblies happen four times a year in the city with members of the Boulé, the council, asking for voting. by show of hands for those running for office, important issues of the day, or privileges to be conferred upon certain overachieving citizens. It's democracy in its purest form, or what was considered pure in the 5th century BCE. One man, one vote, the essential practice that finally lands on the shores of a new world, and in the hearts and minds of revolutionary colonists, demanding the same democratic rights that once belonged to the ancients. American History at listeners. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for joining us. Every four years in this country, yard signs on residential streets and billboards on the highways proliferate, pledging their

allegiance to one presidential candidate or another. Voter registration drives take over shopping centers. The neighbors are canvassing. The news media floods our feeds with policy statements, arguments, arguments, and counter arguments. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the midst of a presidential election. And here at American history it got us thinking, what makes a strong presidential candidate? Myer American elections so unique. And how easy is it really to mess with the election results? So as we head further into this campaign season, we're diving into the historical archives for presidential elections explained. In this first episode today, we look at the backbone of democracy, the vote. I'm honored to be joined by Alan Lickman. Alan has correctly predicted

every presidential election since 1984. Well, except for the Gore v. Bush election in 2000. No one saw that one coming. Alan is a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C., and has been an expert witness in some 100 civil and voting rights cases. Hello, Alan. Welcome. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. I would say I got Bush versus Gore right, as I approved in my report to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which is still up on their website. The wrong man was elected president based on. on the intent of voters, Al Gore should have won Florida going away in the presidency that was further proven by a follow-up that I had nothing to do with by Professor

Miebain of Cornell University. But we're not here to re-litigate 2000, are we? Not at all. We could argue about that election forever. That's right. We're here to talk about the history of the vote. Essentially, an epic and arduous journey through constitutional amendments, namely four, the 15th, the 19th, the 24th, the 26th.

Each of these grants or expands voting rights among sectors of the American population. Real quick. 15th, formerly enslaved Americans, 1865. 19th, women, 1920. 24th, outlaws discriminatory practices at the polls in 1965. 26 lowers the age restriction from 21 to 18. These are massive icebergs to discuss, but for our purposes today, we're going to address the tips, professor. But first, we must begin with the founding document, the U.S. Constitution.

Fair to say, most Americans believe that voting is one of their fundamental rights as citizens, but it's not in the original language or even in the Bill of Rights. Of all things, in creating a democracy, did they ignore the right to vote? They really did ignore the right to vote. Remarkably, you know, the basis of the Constitution and of our Democratic Republic is sovereignty of the people, which is, of course, based on the vote. But there is no right to vote in the Constitution. Constitution, or as you say, in the Bill of Rights, or as we can discuss, in any of these subsequent

amendments that you have so properly pointed out. They didn't spend a whole lot of time on the vote, and mostly they were discussing whether they should follow the precedent of the colonial era and the Articles of Confederation and limit the vote to those who had economic property, who were property holders or taxpayers, which was tied to property. And they punted on that. They decided they couldn't come up with national qualifications. So they left voting qualifications up to the states and did not include any constitutional right to vote in the document itself. Yeah, it's an important thing to hang our hat on. It's really fundamental to understanding the strangeness of this situation, the whole dilemma we face, which is if you don't grant universal right to vote, even to one sector of the society in that language, you have opened the door to all sorts of possibilities of people litigating this way and that, and that indeed is what it happens. At the center point of this whole thing is that constitutional dilemma. That's absolutely correct. And it would make a big difference for the voting rights of Americans, including adjudication by the courts if, in fact, we the American people could rely on a constitutional right to vote.

And as, you know, the title of my book is the embattled vote in America from the founding to the present. And the vote has been embattled. The vote has been restricted throughout the history of our Democratic Republic, and people had to fight and die to get voting rights. and voting rights, even in our own time, you know, 200 plus years since the founding, voting rights are not fully secure. Who got the vote?

At first, it was, I know, all white men, all property owning, many of them, elite slave owners. How was this determined at the very beginning? Yes. This, as I said, was left to default to the states. And this meant you would continue to have women excluded from America's political compact. ironically, one state did very briefly allow women's voting. That was New Jersey, but that was snuffed out in 1807. So half or more of the population is wiped out from voting. And it's kind of a myth that African Americans didn't vote in the very early republic. Quite a few states did not have white-only voting. But that began to change in the 19th century. We had a monumental change in how the vote was established by the states. As I explained, early on,

it was tied to something external, basically your owning of property. That began to switch in the 19th century to intrinsic personal qualifications. That is, the nation moved pretty much towards universal white suffrage, that is, for white males over the age, at least of 21 or over. And others were excluded on the basis of who they were. They were not considered to have the qualifications to vote. That included women, and the states then moved to exclude minorities, to have white-only voting. On the eve of the Civil War, in 1860, only a handful of New England states with a very small proportion of the Freebok population did not have white-only voting. Most of the original states and the new states that came into the union in the

19th century up through the Civil War mandated white-only voting. In fact, the first voting rights sued in America was not filed during reconstruction. It was not filed after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1865. It was filed in the 1830s by William Fogg, an African-American resident of Pennsylvania. At that time, the Pennsylvania Constitution did not mandate wide only voting, and he was fully qualified under the terms of the Pennsylvania Constitution, but he was stopped because of his race by election officials from voting. He won his lawsuit in the lower court and then lost in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which basically said African Americans are a depraved race who have no part in our political compact, and it's perfectly

legitimate to exclude them from the ballot. And get this, you know, ironically, they said, there is a solution. Maybe over time, black blood will become so diluted in this country that black people will look white and be able to vote. And then immediately after that, at its constitutional convention, Pennsylvania conformed with what the overwhelming majority of states were doing, mandating white-only voting. So they moved towards what I call a white man's republic. Basically, if you were a white man, 21 years or over, and not a pauper, you had a right to vote, and nobody else did. Not Native Americans, indigenous people, not racial minorities, not women. Ironically, in some of the states, they actually had non-citizen

voting. The idea that only citizen voting is a great American tradition is not true. So once the property qualification, first of all, when did that end as a rule? That pretty much ended in the first half or so of the 19th century, as states moved from external property qualifications to intrinsic qualifications, basically saying the only ones who had the capabilities to vote were adult white males, not indigenous people, not racial minorities, not women. And so by the eve of the Civil War, we were very much a white man's republic. Did you have a card carrying white person? I mean, how did they determine that? Well, you know, one of the most fraught issues throughout American history, and there's a lot of scholarship on this, is whiteness. How do you determine who is white? And not only were the states up to the Civil War mandating white-only voting, but the qualifications for citizenship, the citizenship law limited citizenship to white person.

You could not become a naturalized citizen if you weren't white. So how in the world you determine whiteness? There's no scientific determination, although racial science that discredited science tried to do it. Supreme Court defined it in the early 1920s. They faced a lawsuit by a man named Thind from India in Asia, and he said, I'm a Caucasian. Certainly, I should have the right to be a citizen under the naturalization laws. Supreme Court said, no, whiteness is defined by people's perception, how the common person in America views white people, and people of Indian descent. And this is a lot of relevance today,

are not white and cannot be included. So basically, Asian people were excluded from citizenship. And then when the nation passed its restrictive immigration laws in 1924, that established quotas for Europeans that heavily privileged northern and western Europe, they also excluded Asians. It's one of many wiggly rules that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, isn't it? I guess some states had religious tests, only Christian men could vote? Very early on, very few states had that, and religious qualifications had pretty much disappeared when they established the white man's republic in the 19th century. So I just want to put a pin in this. Much of this has to do,

with the shift from Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution, and the voting dilemma comes with it, where everything is in the state's hands. Part of that was because of how hard it would be to ratify the Constitution. That is correct. The Constitution deflects voting qualifications to the states. And here's one of the great paradoxes that arises out of it. The qualifications for president have nothing to do with property, nothing to do with race, and nothing to do with gender. They have to do with age, citizenship, and residency. So in the 19th century, if you are a woman of age, a citizen who had resided in the United States for 14 years or more, you could run for president, but you couldn't vote in your state.

Same thing if you were an African-American, fully qualified under the standards for running for president. In the 19th century, you could run for president, but you couldn't vote in your state. you know, this is some of the great dilemmas that arise out of not having a right to vote enshrined in our founding document. Professor, let's move on and talk about race and the reconstruction amendments after the Civil War. These are the first big amendments that approach the questions of voting, obviously. But first, there's the 13th Amendment which abolishes slavery, ratified December 1865, 14th, Grant Citizenship, Equal Protection, 1868. it's the 15th Amendment passed by Congress February 26, 1869, ratified February 3, 1870,

that becomes the first voting rights act. And it reads in part, if I may, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Interesting. Implies the right to vote, but only in the negative. This is the first time we're even talking about it in the Constitution, aren't we? That's very important. This, and we'll see, every other amendment is all phrased in the negative in terms of what states cannot do. None of these amendments positively grant anyone the right to vote. And this was a big sticking point in the debates over the 15th Amendment. That is, should we actually move towards what they called universal suffrage? It wasn't really universal because it wouldn't include women,

but actually have a positive rather than negative amendment that would go beyond simply prohibiting the states, as you said, from denying the right to vote, essentially to the newly freed slaves. And that idea was rejected. Basically, those who supported the 15th Amendment said, you know, we shed our blood to free the slaves and we can protect their right to vote. But that's as far as we can go. There isn't a consensus to go beyond that. Some also objected to say, look, this amendment won't work. Yes, you have prohibited the states from denying the right to vote on race, color, or condition of previous servitude. But they can get around that by passing other kinds of qualifications that discriminatorily impact African Americans, minorities, such as educational qualifications.

And maybe we need to have a more inclusive amendment that, too, was rejected. at the debates. So these issues were raised. And the idea of a broader amendment or a more positive amendment was affirmatively rejected by the Congress at the time, really setting the precedent for all other voting rights amendments to be phrased in the negative and to be limited. I want to be clear. So they made a choice to sound vague. They wanted the window open for, what, states to make up their minds? Is that what was happening? Was they really just worried about stepping on the state's rights? In part, they were worried on stepping on states' rights, but they understood it was a very limited consensus at the time to expand the franchise. Remember,

all the states up to the civil war were restricting the franchise beyond white males who were adults. And they did not believe they could get an amendment ratified by the states that went anything beyond than this negatively worded amendment targeted to the newly freed slaves. So the central thing is how difficult it is to get it done. But that leaves the door open for southern states to pass things like poll taxes, as you say, literacy tests, grandfather clauses for upwards of a hundred years. I mean, this goes into Jim Crow and so forth. Can you explain the poll tax that's going to come back in the 20th century? What does that mean? This amendment left the door open for all kinds of indirect ways of snuffing out African-American voting in the

South without directly targeting by race. Let's understand that by the 1870s and 1880s, reconstruction was over. The South had been taken over, the old Confederate states, by white supremacists who then controlled southern governments, and, instituted the system of Jim Crow in the late 19th and early 20th century. This was a comprehensive system of racial discrimination, which extended to voting, of course, I'll talk about it in a moment, but to almost every realm of life. It established legalized segregation, not just in the schools, but in all public facilities, public parks, playgrounds, courthouses. It involved de facto discrimination. in places of public accommodations, bars, restaurants, hotels, parks, forms of transportation.

It excluded African Americans from the justice system. It relegated African Americans to the bottom of the employment ladder. And in voting, because the amendment was phrased so negatively, it opened the door to several ways in which, essentially, by the early 20th century, African-American voting, which had been quite robust during Reconstruction, was pretty much snuffed out. None of these amendments, none of these laws or constitutional amendments directly targeted race, but they clearly had that effect. And openly, white supremacists admitted they didn't want African-Americans to vote. It's a very important lesson for our own time, because you can discriminate against minorities indirectly through measures, that seemed to be racially neutral.

So the polls tax applied to everyone. It wasn't limited to African Americans, but of course African Americans were at the bottom of the economic ladder. But even more effective was restrictive registration laws, which sort of operated at the point of the right to vote. If you can't register, you can't vote. And then, of course, probably even more effective was the so-called white primary.

Once the white supremacists took over these governments, they were, of course, Democrats, remember, in those days, Republicans were the party of Lincoln, the party of civil rights. That's completely shifted in our own time, but that's what it was then. So pretty much only Democrats got elected to public office in the South. And so the real election was the primary. And if you limited the primary to white people, then African Americans had no voice in electing candidates of their choice. This was not. fully wiped out by the Supreme Court, believe it or not, until the 1940s. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. I mean, it's really important for people to realize when you hear the term voter suppression, this goes all the way back to the beginning. I mean, this was a practice that was really instated early in the days of the United States and really ramped up during Jim Crow for sure. That's why I say in my book, the embattled vote in America,

the issues have changed, the players have changed, the parties have reversed themselves, but the same battles still continue. We're still fighting for the right to vote. The right to vote remains embattled. It takes until the 20th century for a lot of this to be unpacked, which is really remarkable to consider that in our lifetimes, mine, as a kid, I remember all of this happening. I was very young, but it's really so recent one lifetime ago that much,

of what we're talking about gets undone. The 15th Amendment is what we've been talking about. That's part of reconstruction. The next amendment we run into in terms of the race problems is the 24th Amendment. It takes 100 years to make the poll tax illegal with the 24th Amendment, 1964, which was ratified then, and it was the illegality of poll tax and other things that it established. Let me read a little bit of that. The rights of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for electors for president or vice president or for senator or another shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay the poll tax or other tax. So when you hear poll tax, that's right in the Constitution as an

amendment number 24. They ruled it unconstitutional. What did that allow to happen? You had, of course, the rise of a very powerful civil rights movement in the 50s and early 1960s that led to a whole series of fundamental changes. That constitutional amendment you point out, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then something we'll talk about very importantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And we cannot, even though it didn't establish fully voting rights,

it just dealt with one aspect of the voter suppression in the United States, the poll tax. There were others that had to be dealt with through the Voting Rights Act. but it established a very important principle that really contradicted the principles established early on in our republic, that your right to vote should not be dependent on your economic status, that you should not have any requirement that had anything to do with your ability to make a payment. Yes, and those are ruled unconstitutional, 1966 that's finally in the books.

This is all in the context, as you've mentioned, of the civil rights movement in the middle 20th century. era of Martin Luther King, Jr. and those extraordinary events, desegregation of schools, Kennedy's civil rights bill, which was passed long after his assassination, and then the famous 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Bloody Sunday on the news that night. We all remember these things or I've seen the movies about this. This leads to the big one, which is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Finally, Lyndon Johnson signs into law the act to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. This is an extraordinary moment because it's really the bookend, the whole process, isn't it? Yes, it is. This is critical. This is a very lengthy, comprehensive law. I'm not going to go through it all, but it targeted measures like discriminatory registration that were directly targeted at keeping minorities from voting. But it went beyond that and established a very important principle. Not only did it enable minorities to register and vote,

and the increases in parts of the Deep South were truly dramatic. But it also established a principle that the vote has to be effective. That is, minorities have to have an equal opportunity with whites to participate fully in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice. That targeted things like racial gerrymandering, that packed African Americans in one district, diluting them everywhere else, or cracked African-American communities so that they would be submerged into white-controlled districts, targeted at-large elections that enabled jurisdictions with a white majority to elect every member of the county commission or city council.

And this was enshrined in two sections of the Voting Rights Act, section two, which provided for lawsuits by the Department of Justice or private parties. And that, by the way, is now being under attack with conservatives saying private parties can't bring lawsuits, even though they have for so many decades, to establish that black people, and this was extended to other minorities as well. There are many amendments to the Voting Rights Act. Language minorities were included and protected. So you could file lawsuits to establish that minorities would have an equal opportunity with whites, not just to vote, but to elect. candidates of their choice, targeting things like racial gerrymandering. Then you had Section 5, which required certain states with a history of discrimination and certain other sub-jurisdictions, mostly in the South, not strictly, but mostly, to preclear any changes in voting laws or rules

with the United States Department of Justice to make sure that new rules or laws did not retrogress on the opportunities for minorities to vote. Thousands of rules and laws over time were rejected by the Department of Justice as being discriminatory against minorities. This provision is very important because, as we know, lawsuits are lengthy, uncertain, very expensive, take a very long time. This is a quick administrative process. It was struck down by the United States.

Supreme Court in 2013 in the Shelby v. Holder decision written by Chief Justice Roberts, in which he basically said, well, you know, the terrible discriminatory restrictions of the 1960s are a thing of the past. We don't need this anymore. You know, complete misreading of history. As I said, yes, the battles have changed and the issues have changed, but discrimination remains very much alive in our own time. And the striking down of Section 5 made it much easier for states to discriminate. Right. It may have a different tone today as we are in an evolved society, but the tools of suppression are the same, which is to sort of disenfranchise a group of the people. Yes. And of course, just as they were justified back then, the justification

is so-called voter integrity. We need things like restrictive registration laws, a purging of registration rolls, felon disenfranchisement, voter photo ID laws and others in order to safeguard the integrity of the ballot and fight voters. It's extraordinary. The immediate impact by the end of 1965 after the passing of the or the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. One third of federal examiners by the end of 1966. Only four out of 13 southern states had fewer than 50% of African Americans registered to vote. That's the impact of making illegal all those suppressive tools that they had been using for all those years prior. It was re-adopted and strengthened in 1970, 75, 82. It has had everything to do with the demographics

of modern America and how votes are cast in this country. And therefore, who is in Congress in all kinds of places? It's amazing. That's exactly right. You know, the composition of American voters was fundamentally changed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and it completely transformed our politics. One of the transformations is the change of the White South, from solidly Democratic today to the strongest Republican area. Whites who are not happy about the expansion of minority voting, about the federal government imposing rules on them, who are once solidly Democratic have now become primarily Republican states like, you know, Mississippi, Alabama. There's just no room for Democrats at all anymore. It's kind of a reversal of the

solid south of the late 19th and early 20th century. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So if you keep in score at home, we have so far covered two of the four constitutional amendments most directly affecting Americans' rights. to vote. The next up is the 19th, which was ratified in 1920. That was for women's suffrage. This was surprising to me, Alan. Gaining women's right to vote had ramped up in the 1870s, but it wasn't at first viewed as constitutional matter. It's a much more complex history than we give it credit for. There were certain states. There were, I think, nine of them that actually allowed for women's voting earlier than 1920. Like all of history, it's a much more complicated

picture, isn't it? Yes. The struggle for women's voting was very long, very fraught, and very difficult. It really begins even before the Civil War and reconstruction. We could point, for example, to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first supposed national convention for women's rights, and one of the provisions passed by this convention was for women's right to vote. And women in the 19th century protested at constitutional conventions that were not authorizing women to vote. Now, women thought at the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, this would be an opportune time to achieve women's suffrage, that they could tie themselves into the movement for black rights. You know, if there is this egalitarian push for the rights of black people, surely women should be included as well. That was not to be those who were advocating for black rights did not include advocacy for women's rights, partly on ideological grounds and partly on practical grounds, you know, arguing, this is the best we can do.

If we bring in women's rights, we are going to lose everything. The result was women had to fight for their own rights. And as you say, the first fights were in individual states, a very slow and long slog for that with mostly lightly populated. Western states taking the lead. It wasn't until the early 20th century that women realized they were not going to get their rights fully, going state by state. And they had to push for what they called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, the constitutional amendment, granting universally women the right to vote. That was finally ratified narrowly by one vote in the state of Tennessee when the swing voter got a letter from his mother, say, you've got to do this with the ladies. One vote. determine women's rights in this country. Are you talking with the 1920 ratification?

Yes, in the state of Tennessee, Harry T. Byrne, the swing vote. That was really the last state that they had an opportunity to get the three quarters of the states to ratify. But again, this amendment is phrased negatively. You can't deny the right to vote on account of sex. It doesn't guarantee the vote to anyone. strangely, only 36% of eligible women voted as a result of that amendment. Male, female balance is not attained until 1980. My grandmother, small anecdote, Ellenusky, her name was born in 1898, never voted.

The woman sat on their rocking chair in our living room every year, and she never got up and went to the voting. There was a big problem with that generation who just sort of had been, I guess, convinced that they didn't matter. I don't know. Well, it was a little more complicated than that. Actually, there was a major anti-suffrage women's movement. A lot of women were what I call conservative maternalists. They believe the role of women was to bear and raise children, to be patriotic Americans, and to take care of their husbands and keep the home. That it would corrupt women if they got involved in the dirty male occupations of business, politics, and war. So many women themselves internalized that kind of patriarchal view. And it took a long time for that to be broken down. And as you say, really, until the latter part of the 20th century. But the interesting thing today is women are the majority of voters. They're going to be at least 53% of the electorate in the 2024 elections.

way a lot of the polls are not fully taking that kind of women dominance into account when they calculate the gender gap. And this could be the first year, 2004, of our first female president, which is a direct attachment to that amendment, to these things. That's the point of this podcast is to say, these four amendments are not just changing voting practices, but it demonstrates how important voting is to the culture as a whole. And of course, when you think it through to how representation changes as a result and enfranchisement changes people in different ways. It's a very, very complex effect that voting has on a population. Let me follow up on that. You know, we are rapidly becoming a majority minority country. Probably by 2040, we will be majority minority.

States like California and Texas, I think, are already pretty much there. And so let's say we elected a woman president, Vice President Harris. She'd also be the first. first American president of mixed African and East Asian descent, foreshadowing where America is going. And of course, in 2008, we elected our first African American president, African American male. I predicted his election. It was really interesting. A lot of critics said, oh, you can't predict an Obama win. America is not ready to elect a black person to be president.

I said, oh, no, you know, that's wrong. You know, my prediction was right, and it is indicative of a much more inclusive, diverse, tolerant kind of society. But a lot of people, you know, there's a very powerful movement pushing strongly against that. They want to harken back to the old America, you know, white, male-dominated, pioneer-stock, Christian America, and they're very worried about the new diverse, tolerant America. We see that in all of these attacks, which have been very very much. effective on diversity, equity, and inclusion measures or on affirmative action. It helps when you stack the court. That gets you someplace. All right. The last one,

we'll just touch on briefly because it's really about age. We drop the last, the 26th Amendment, 1971 drops the age restriction from 21 to 18. It's due to the Vietnam War. If you're old enough to go away to fight, then you're old enough to vote. I remember it well. I had a bumper sticker on my own door. It's all a very developing history, as we are explaining. Once votes were public and you expressed your position in the open had to do with market days, right? I mean, let's talk about the process of how votes are cast, which again is something people take for granted, but actually was the result of very conscious choices made. Yeah, there's been a total transformation in so many ways about how votes were cast. Pretty much until the early 20th century,

there weren't official state secret ballots. You sometimes cast vote by voice or you cast vote by ballots produced by the parties, which tended to be color-coded so you kind of knew how people were voting. Then that was changed in the 20th century to the secret ballot, so you wouldn't know how people were voting, and ballots produced by the government, not by the political parties. This was in part designed to stop vote by. who knows how much vote buying there was.

The other monumental change in how people vote was to establish personal registration. This was targeted at the urban political machines, which are considered corrupt and were martyally all these immigrants and poor people to the ballot box. Now you had to take an additional step. You had a register and then vote. And this had a very important effect. Indeed, probably the framers wanted this. to reduce voter turnout, particularly among minorities and the less affluent.

And in recent times, there have been some major innovations in voting, an enormous expansion in mail-in voting, which in earlier times is pretty much non-existent. Most states, not all, but most states now have non-excused absentee ballots. Like in Maryland, I can get an absentee ballot. I don't have to give me any reason. states do that. And during the COVID epidemic, there was an enormous outpouring of votes by mail. It's come down, but it's since become a very important component of voting. The other thing that didn't exist in earlier times was early voting. We no longer really have a single election day.

Most states allow you to vote for some period before election day. And there's been a lot of pushback on this, but these are now common established practices that are really unique to recent times. When do you think that electronic voting will take over, you know, as far as using your emails and so forth? Not anytime soon. The problem is I'm no expert on this. I'm an old dinosaur.

I'm 77. I'm not a technician. But the issue is hacking. You know, if you can hack into the Defense Department, I'm not sure you could have secure electronic voting. Which is good news for the U.S. postal office, which people are constantly trying to defund and send away in our lives, but it's protected by the need for mail-in voting, isn't it? Yeah, and one way they try to restrict mail-in voting is to say, even if you sent in your ballot

before Election Day, perfectly valid ballot, it had to arrive on Election Day as opposed to having a grace period afterwards. Another one of the more subtle methods of suppressing the vote. I want to finish our conversation talking about the Electoral College, which is an episode until itself, but why November? I've always wondered why, it goes all the way back, that the election day is that first Tuesday in November, right? Two reasons. One, you know, we're an agricultural society. This was adopted in 1845. Before that, we did not have a uniform election day, and this basically allowed the harvest to continue, but it wasn't pushed into winter where it would be difficult for people to get to the polls. The idea of a secret ballot was something that really was

imported from overseas, wasn't it? It was an Australian idea that we took on. It was called the Australian ballot because it was an Australian idea that was adopted in the late 19th and early 20th century here. I hope people are listening to this and have made it to this point of realizing that there is a complexity to this history that it is more than meets the eye. And much of the threads of what we hear about voter suppression, et cetera, are rooted in very, very profound history. So when you're watching the news and hearing all this stuff happening, and we have been for months now, you're really taking a history lesson. You're sort of being, you know, reintroduced to this thing that has been part of the American story, a driving engine of the American story for the entire length of

our democracy. It's extraordinary. That's absolutely right. And that's why my book is entitled, the embattled vote in America, from the founding to the present. The vote has been and continues to be embattled and people don't understand for most of our history, the great majority of the American people. Minorities, women, poor people didn't have the right to vote.

I want to end with a subject that deserves an entire episode onto itself, of course, the electoral college in the Constitution. How did the notion of this come about? I suppose it's an English tradition, right, coming back to the lords and all that sort of thing, and a sort of elite group must

be in charge, or the mob will take over. Is that really where the Electoral College still comes from? You know, we're the world's longest-running continuous democracy. And that's a great thing, because we have strong traditions. But on the other hand, we are saddled with obsolete 18th-century institutions, one of the worst of which is the Electoral College. And indeed, the Electoral College, as you mentioned, is tied to the idea that geography, matters. It should matter where you live, even though you're electing a national officer like the president of the United States, and therefore you've got to give each state its due. But it runs

much deeper than that. There were two deeper factors. One, the framers wanted every state to ratify the Constitution. That not only included big states like New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, but small states like Rhode Island and Georgia. I mean small in population. So they gave them all two senators, and they gave them the electoral college, which guaranteed at least three electoral college votes, two senators, and every state had at least one member of Congress.

And the worst part of the electoral college is it's deeply tied to slavery. Remember, America was evenly divided between slave and free states in its early years. and so you had to get the slave states to go along. The slave states, of course, bitterly opposed the idea of a popular vote for president, because slaves would count for nothing, so they didn't vote. They wanted an electoral college system that gave each state votes according to two senators

and their number of congressional representatives. And even though slaves didn't vote, they wanted slaves fully counted for the apportionment of congressional seats in their states. That, of course, was not acceptable to the free states. So we had the most notorious aspect of the Constitution, and you know what that is, the so-called three-fifths compromise, that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportionment to the electoral college. So it's deeply tied to slavery and to an imperative of getting the small states to sign on that doesn't exist anymore.

One final point. In those days, the discrepancy between small states and big states was nowhere near what it is today. It's six or seven to one. Today it's over 60 to one. And so again, this is an obsolete institution that in our own time has created vastly greater inequities than in the late 18th century. And the alternative is what is done in other countries, other democratic countries, which is a popular vote, is how you choose your people. It's a very unique quality of. American political life. And most people want a popular vote, but it's impossible, of course, to get two-thirds of both houses and three-quarters of states to ratify this. Yeah, there have been more than 700 proposals to reform or remove the Electoral College. Alan Lickman is a distinguished professor of history at the American University in Washington, D.C. He has written books including White Protestant Nation, the rise of the American conservative movement, the keys to the White House, the 13 keys to the presidency. And I have intentionally,

avoided asking you for your prediction, Alan, as ours tries to be historic and neutral ground. So we won't do that. But if you'd like to look into Alan's crystal ball, you can find many clips and articles of his online. Yeah, you want to follow my predictions and my analysis. I have a live show with my son every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern at Alan Lickman YouTube. A L-L-L-A-N-L-I-C-H-M-A-N, YouTube. I can't wait to watch. Thank you, Alan. Thanks, Don. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes,

two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend.

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