The Secret Ballot Is an Australian Export

Until 1856, voting in most of the English-speaking world was a public performance. In a typical British or American election, you walked up to a clerk in front of a crowd and announced your choice ("viva voce"), or handed in a colored paper ticket the party had printed for you. Bribing a voter was simple bookkeeping: you paid him, then watched to see he delivered.

The colony of Victoria, in southeastern Australia, had a particular problem with this. The 1850s gold rush had brought tens of thousands of immigrants to Melbourne, many of them Chartists fleeing the political defeats of the 1840s. Their fight, the Eureka Stockade rebellion of December 1854, was partly about the right to vote — but a secret one. Two years later, on March 19, 1856, the Victorian parliament gave assent to an electoral act that printed every candidate's name on a single ballot paper, distributed only at the polling station, marked in private. The first election under the new system ran from August to October 1856. Tasmania got there a few weeks earlier with its own act in February, and South Australia followed within a month.

London resisted for sixteen years. The Ballot Act 1872 finally introduced the same system in Britain. The United States was slower still. Louisville, Kentucky adopted what newspapers were now calling "the Australian ballot" in 1888. Massachusetts went statewide that same year. By 1910 almost every state had followed; South Carolina, the last holdout, did not fully comply until 1950.

The innovation was not just secrecy. It was also that the government printed the ballot, instead of the parties. That single change — candidates listed neutrally, the paper handed out only inside the polling place — is what made vote-buying expensive enough to mostly stop. The trick a Melbourne legislator wrote down in 1856 is the trick almost every democracy still runs on.