Russell DeSimone: Early Rhode Island Election Tickets

Following up on last week’s post about Dorr Rebellion election tickets, we invited scholar Russell DeSimone to write this post about election tickets. Click here for DeSimone’s survey of tickets.

Young Rhode Island voters have firsthand experience with the election system currently in use in which paper ballots are electronically tallied. Older voters well remember the large voting booths with the drawn curtain, mechanical levers, and the cumbersome master handle. Invariably modern day voters know little about the voting process used in earlier times.

Rhode Island, as a corporately chartered English colony, directly elected its governor and other government officials. This differed from royally chartered and proprietary colonies that had their governors appointed. The earliest Rhode Island elections were held viva voce and general officers were elected on an annual basis. Officers included governor, deputy governor and ten assistants. Freemen, those who could vote, were adult males who met certain property requirements and their eldest adult sons. Elections required the freemen to travel to Newport, the capitol town, in order to cast their votes.  This travel represented a significant burden to many of the freemen since most were farmers and election day came in the early spring when they were occupied with planting their crops. By the late 1640s the requirement to travel to Newport was removed “forasmuch as many may be necessarily detained, that they cannot come to the General Court of Election, that then they shall send their votes sealed up unto the said Court, which shall be as effective as their personal appearance”. Thus Rhode Island’s unique proxy elective system was established and the use of paper ballots or election tickets became the norm. To vote the freeman signed his name on the back of the prox. These tickets were collected by the town clerks, sealed in an envelope and sent to Newport to be counted on election day.  In effect the freemen were voting by proxy and each paper ballot was referred to as prox.

Proxy ballots were initially handwritten but by the 1740s printed proxs began to be used. The earliest known surviving example is in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society and dates to about 1744. Early state proxs differ from their colonial counterparts in that the offices of deputy governor and the ten assistants were replaced by the office of lieutenant governor and ten senators. The statewide prox would again change following the turmoil of the Dorr Rebellion and the adoption of a state constitution in 1843 when the only offices to appear on the prox were that of governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer. State senator candidates were thereafter to appear on local election tickets. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries printed ballots were not issued by the state but were provided by the candidate or his party. In addition to state office elections in April, Rhode Island freemen voted for their US Representative in separate semi-annual elections held in August and for electors of President of the United States in quadrennial elections in November. Proxs from this early period often provided the name of the party in which the candidates were affiliated and on occasion included slogans representative of the party’s platform (see figure). Taken in their entirety election tickets chronicle Rhode Island’s rich political history spanning state and local politics, political factions  from the Ward-Hopkins controversy of the colonial period to political factions during the War of 1812, the Anti-Masonic period of the 1830s, the Law and Order coalition of the 1840s following events of the Dorr Rebellion, the temperance movement of the 1850s, the pro-Union tickets of the Civil War, and Greenback party and Prohibitory factions of the 1870s and 1880s.

Figure – Election ticket from the contested 1835 statewide election.

With the advent of the election prox opportunities for fraud occurred. One of the earliest contested elections occurred several years after the proxy voting method was first adopted in the 1640s. Frauds consisted of everything from altered ballots to ballot box stuffing. Opportunities for fraud continued through the centuries until the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law at its March 29, 1889 session which adopted the Australian secret ballot method. Henceforth ballots were issued by the state and the freeman placed his ballot in a specially provided envelop.  Election tickets continued in use for local offices for the remainder of the 19th century, however, for all intensive purposes, after lasting nearly 250 years the age of proxy voting  in Rhode Island came to an end with the close of the 19th century.