TEXAS BALLOT REFORM: THE ADOPTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING SYSTEM, 1887-1891 by Bobby Oliver D... more TEXAS BALLOT REFORM: THE ADOPTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING SYSTEM, 1887-1891 by Bobby Oliver Department of History Texas Christian University Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History This paper examines Texas’s efforts to adopt voter registration and the Australian balloting system during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Vote fraud had become endemic in Texas and throughout the nation following the Civil War. Texas was unique in that its enactment of voter registration and the Australian ballot applied only to cities with populations of ten thousand inhabitants or more. While election fraud and manipulation occurred in Texas’s cities, it was also ubiquitous in the rural areas left untouched by the voter registration and the Australian ballot laws. Texas Democrats, increasingly challenged in both the cities and rural districts, used both provisions to attain “purity of the ballot” legislation. To Texas Democrats, good government meant less, not more, democracy...
TEXAS BALLOT REFORM: THE ADOPTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING SYSTEM, 1887-1891 by Bobby Oliver D... more TEXAS BALLOT REFORM: THE ADOPTION OF THE AUSTRALIAN BALLOTING SYSTEM, 1887-1891 by Bobby Oliver Department of History Texas Christian University Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History This paper examines Texas’s efforts to adopt voter registration and the Australian balloting system during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Vote fraud had become endemic in Texas and throughout the nation following the Civil War. Texas was unique in that its enactment of voter registration and the Australian ballot applied only to cities with populations of ten thousand inhabitants or more. While election fraud and manipulation occurred in Texas’s cities, it was also ubiquitous in the rural areas left untouched by the voter registration and the Australian ballot laws. Texas Democrats, increasingly challenged in both the cities and rural districts, used both provisions to attain “purity of the ballot” legislation. To Texas Democrats, good government meant less, not more, democracy...
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