The secret ballot protects the incumbency advantage.

• Author: Heckelman, Jac C.

"No man has ever placed his money corruptly without satisfying himself that the vote was cast according to the agreement, or, in a phrase which became only too common during the last campaign, without proof that "the goods were delivered"; and when there is to be no proof but the word of the bribe-taker (who may have received thrice the sum to vote for the briber's opponent), it is idle to place any trust in such a use of money. In other words, take away all interest in committing an offence, and the offence will soon disappear." --John Wigmore, The Australian Ballot System as Embodied in the Legislation of Various Countries (1889) Many students of the secret (or Australian) ballot have maintained that rampant corruption and fraudulent voting during the Gilded Age forced legislators to adopt various reforms to curb these practices (Evans 1917; Harris 1934; Converse 1972; Rusk 1974). As Wigmore (1889) and others of the time noted, the Australian ballot eliminates the incentive for candidates to try to purchase votes directly.

Proponents of revisionist theories, however, maintain that the Australian ballot led to a partisan advantage for certain political parties. We owe the first such theory to Burnham (1970), who argues that business and local elites conspired with the Republican Party to limit the influence of party machines by removing their primary function, the distribution of party ballots. Weakening the opposition party produced less-competitive elections and thereby helped to insulate the entrenched majorities from new competition. Kousser (1974) argues that blacks and illiterates could not mark the new ballots properly, and therefore Southern Democrats enacted the laws to discourage voter support of the Republican Party during Reconstruction, again helping the established majority party. Argersinger (1980) notes the antifusion possibilities of a single publicly printed ballot, where candidates could not run under different party banners simultaneously, thus further protecting Northern Republicans from the threat of independent parties.

The revisionist theories concentrate on the new form of the ballot but ignore the secrecy it provides. Previous work on the Australian ballot system thus falls into two general groups: the secret ballot has been viewed either as a needed measure to reduce direct vote purchasing or as a partisan law designed to impart an electoral advantage. In this article, I describe a hybrid hypothesis: by eliminating direct vote buying, the Australian ballot can give an electoral advantage to incumbent officeholders. Viewed in this way, when the law was enacted, it was nonpartisan, but it should not be considered a pure act of reform. Rather, incumbents, regardless of party affiliation, benefited from eliminating wasteful bribes that lessened their initial advantage.

Prior to adoption of the secret ballot, elections were held originally by voice or hand voting and then by separate colored ballots that allowed voters to be monitored easily. Hence, political parties were in a position to offer money in return for votes. Newspapers and the popular press chronicled this active vote market. For example, Speed (1905) claimed that 170,000 vote sellers were "employed for the day" in New York City, and McCook (1892) discusses vote-market activity in various small towns and city wards throughout Connecticut. (1)

Secrecy in voting eliminated the possibility of verification, however. Without verification, parties would not risk their money by paying someone to vote for them. Under a secret ballot, the vote contract became unenforceable.

Although the intent of the secret ballot was to dismantle the vote market, it may not have been enacted strictly to save the "integrity of the ballot." Incumbent candidates could expect to prosper under the secret-ballot system because it eliminated the incentive to bribe voters. Given that candidates were unaware of individual voter preferences, then, in general, bribery was more efficient for challengers, and therefore incumbents benefited directly from legislation that inhibited it.

This line of argument resembles one advanced by Bender (1988), who notes that...