Australian ballot

A printed ballot that bears the names of all candidates and the texts of propositions and is distributed to the voter at the polls and marked in secret. Also called secret ballot.

A ballot prepared by public officials listing all the candidates for office. So called by late nineteenth-century American reformers, who wished to substitute such ballots, as used in Australia, for the earlier American practice whereby parties prepared their own lists of their candidates and handed them to their supporters. As ‘Australian’ ballots are now virtually universal, the term is obsolete.

The Australian ballot, invented in that country in 1858, is a ballot printed by the government with all candidates for each office listed, to be marked by voters in voting booths. This process permits a secret ballot. By 1892 the Australian ballot had been adopted by all the states. Prior to the 1880s most states did not have secret balloting for President. Voters would tell election officials whom they favored or put ballots printed by political parties into a ballot box. Both systems made it difficult to preserve confidentiality. Using party ballots also made split-ticket voting (voting for a President of one party and members of the House or Senate from another) impossible. The Australian ballot reduced fraud and increased split-ticket voting, but it also reduced turnout because voters had to be able to read the ballot, which had not been the case with party ballots.

See also Election campaigns, Presidential

Sources

• Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955.
• Richard P. McCormick, The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)