Edward B. Foley. Ballot Battles

Edward B. Foley’s Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, a survey of contested elections since the nation’s founding, documents numerous instances when public officials charged with administering the electoral process have betrayed the public’s trust. The largely ministerial duties of county clerks and secretaries of state ordinarily do not excite much interest, but in a very close contest they may be called upon to decide which votes to count and which to leave aside. Inevitably, there is some irregularity in the vote-counting process that partisans can seize upon to disqualify ballots going to their opponents. The challenge for the election officials is in deciding when the democratic process has been so thoroughly compromised as to justify nullifying all or some of the returns and when such a rigid adherence to the rules amounts to thwarting the manifest will of the electorate. Foley investigates the evidence, legal reasoning, and implications behind some of the most infamous attempts at overturning the vox populi. Ballot Battles begins its coverage with the earliest elections following independence. Because the Founding Fathers saw no role for political parties in their new nation, they did not anticipate the temptations and pressures that public officials would be subjected to when it came to resolving especially close or problematic outcomes. A defeat in the general election might be reversed by rejecting some returns on the basis of a minor clerical error: a document without a signature or a seal or with a candidate’s name misspelled. The perpetrators could be remarkably blasé about their actions. Florida’s secretary of state Samuel B. McLin rationalized his own participation in the 1876 swindle by claiming that it was “fairly allowable in politics that I should always lean to my own party, and give my decision in its favor, even at the hazard of straining a point” (122). Now and then, we encounter principled public officials who stood in the way of such malfeasance, even when their party stood to benefit. Sometimes the closeness of the contest, the violation of legal niceties on all sides, and the technical malfunctions can make a fair and accurate outcome problematic; here Florida in 2000 comes to mind. But most of the episodes Foley documents evince a troubling disregard for the democratic process.

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