Historically Speaking: The Hunt for a Better Way to Vote

Despite centuries of innovation, the humble 2,500-year-old ballot box is here to stay.

The Wall Street Journal

January 4, 2024

At least 40 national elections will take place around the world over the next year, with some two billion people going to the polls. Thanks to the 2,500-year-old invention of the ballot box, in most races these votes will actually count and be counted.

Ballot boxes were first used in Athens during the 5th century B.C., but in trials rather than elections. Legal cases were tried before a gathering of male citizens, known as the Assembly, and decided by vote. Jurors indicated their verdict by dropping either a marked or unmarked pebble into an urn, which protected them against violence by keeping their decision secret.

The first recorded case of ballot box stuffing also took place in 5th century Athens. To exile an unpopular Athenian via an “ostracism election,” Assembly voters simply had to scratch his name on an ostraka, a pottery shard, and whomever reached a certain threshold of votes was banished for 10 years. It is believed that Themistocles’s political enemies rigged his ostracism vote in 472 B.C. by distributing pre-etched shards throughout the Assembly.

In 139 B.C., the Romans passed a series of voter secrecy laws starting with the Lex Gabinia, which introduced the secret ballot for magistrate elections. A citizen would write his vote on a wax-covered wooden tablet and then deposit it in a wicker basket called a cista. The cistae were so effective at protecting voters from public scrutiny that many senators, including Cicero, regarded the ballot box as an attack on their authority and a dangerous concession to mob rule.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The fact that secret ballots allowed men to vote as they pleased was one reason why King Charles I of England ordered all “balloting boxes” to be taken out of circulation in 1637, where they remained until the 19th century.

Even then, there was strong resistance to ballot boxes in Britain and America on the grounds that they were unmanly: A citizen ought to display his vote, not hide it. In any case, there was nothing special about a 19th-century ballot box except its convenience for stealing or stuffing. One notorious election scam in San Francisco in the 1850s involved a ballot box with a false bottom.

Public outrage over rigged elections in the U.S. led some states to adopt Samuel Jollie’s tamper-proof glass ballot box, which New York first used in 1857. But a transparent design couldn’t prevent these boxes from mysteriously disappearing, nor would it have saved Edgar Allan Poe, who is thought to have died in Baltimore from being “cooped,” a practice where kidnap victims were drugged into docility and made to vote multiple times.

To better guarantee the integrity of elections, New York introduced in 1892 a new machine by Jacob Myers that allowed voters to privately choose candidates by pulling a lever, which dispensed with ballots and ballot boxes. Other inventors quickly improved on the design and by 1900 Jollie’s glass ballot box had become obsolete. By World War II almost every city had switched over to mechanical voting systems, which tallied votes automatically.

The simple ballot box seemed destined to disappear until controversies over machine irregularities in the 2000 presidential election resulted in the Help America Vote Act, which requires all votes to have a paper record. The ballot box still isn’t the perfect shield against fraud. But then, neither is anything else.

Historically Speaking: Sleuthing Through the Ages

Illustration by Dominic Bugatto

From Oedipus to Sherlock Holmes, readers have flocked to stories about determined detectives.

May 21, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

I have to confess that I’ve spent the lockdown reading thrillers and whodunits. But judging by the domination of mystery titles on the bestseller lists, so has nearly everyone else. In uncertain times, crime fiction offers certainty, resolution and comfort.

The roots of the genre go back to the ancient Greeks. Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King,” written around 429 B.C., is in essence a murder mystery. The play begins with Oedipus swearing that he will not rest until he discovers who killed Laius, the previous king of Thebes. Like a modern detective, Oedipus questions witnesses and follows clues until the terrible truth is revealed: He is both the investigator and the criminal, having unwittingly murdered his father and married his mother.

The Chinese were the first to give crime fiction a name. Gong’an or “magistrate’s desk” literature developed during the Song dynasty (960-1279), featuring judges who recount the details of a difficult or dangerous case. Modern Western crime fiction adopted a more individualistic approach, making heroes out of amateurs. The 1819 novella “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, is an early prototype: The heroine, an elderly writer, helps to solve a serial murder case involving stolen jewelry.

But it is Edgar Allan Poe who is generally regarded as the godfather of detective fiction. His short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, features an amateur sleuth, Auguste Dupin, who solves the mysterious, gruesome deaths of two women. (Spoiler: The culprit was an escaped orangutan.) Poe invented some of the genre’s most important devices, including the “locked room” puzzle, in which a murder takes place under seemingly impossible conditions.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series added three innovations that quickly became conventions: the loyal sidekick, the arch-villain and the use of forensic science. In the violin-playing, drug-abusing Holmes, Doyle also created a psychologically complex character who enthralled readers—too much for Doyle’s liking. Desperate to be considered a literary writer, he killed off Holmes in 1893, only to be forced by public demand to resurrect him 12 years later.

When Doyle published his last Holmes story in 1927, the “Golden Age” of British crime fiction was in full swing. Writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers created genteel detectives who solved “cozy crimes” in upper-middle-class settings, winning a huge readership and inspiring American imitators like S.S. Van Dine, the creator of detective Philo Vance, who published a list of “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.”

As violence and corruption increased under Prohibition, American mystery writing turned toward more “hard-boiled” social realism. In Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s noir fiction, dead bodies in libraries are replaced by bloody corpses in cars.

At the time, critics quarreled about which type of mystery was superior, though both can seem old-fashioned compared with today’s spy novels and psychological thrillers. The number of mystery subgenres seems to be infinite. Yet one thing will never change: our yearning for a hero who is, in Raymond Chandler’s words, “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”