Voter Turnout in Early Ohio

By the 1840s a far, far greater proportion of the adult white male population of the United States voted regularly than had done so fifty years earlier. This significant change, we know, owed less to alterations in suffrage law, since the franchise was already broadly available in most states by 1789, than to the increase in the number of polling stations and, even more, to the growing interest of the electorate in politics.1 So much seems certain, but at what precise moments did the decisive extensions of the voting habit occur? Was there a sudden major surge of interest, for example, with the introduction of the nationwide, evenly balanced Second Party System in the late 1830s? Or had the increase come about incrementally, with a succession of minor expansions, each extending the range of popular involvement? Over twenty years ago J. R. Pole, Richard P. McCormick, and David Hackett Fischer demonstrated that at times far more men voted during the Jeffersonian era than earlier writers had assumed; and, on the whole, these moments of high voter turnout coincided with the climaxes of intense party competition between Federalists and Republicans.2 Yet what happened after such periods of greater involve

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