The Secret Ballot Was an Australian Idea That Took Forty Years to Reach America

For most of the 19th century, voting in Britain, the United States, and the colonies they had spawned was a partisan public event. A voter walked up to the polling place, accepted a ballot from a party agent — printed on coloured paper distinct to each party so observers could tell at a glance who was voting how — and deposited it in a box in front of the crowd. Bribery and intimidation worked because they could be verified.

In 1856 the colonies of Victoria and South Australia, then self-governing British dependencies, passed reforms within a few months of each other. The state would now print uniform ballots listing every candidate. Voters would mark them in private booths, fold them, and place them in the box. The reform was bundled with extending the vote to all adult men.

The procedural detail mattered. Anonymity made vote-buying nearly impossible to enforce, since no one could prove afterwards what a paid voter had done in the booth. Tasmania, New South Wales, and New Zealand followed within a decade.

In Britain and the United States the reform took longer, despite vocal advocacy from John Stuart Mill among others. Massachusetts adopted what was openly called the "Australian ballot" in 1888, and most American states had it by 1892. The British equivalent, the Ballot Act, passed in 1872, drawing partly on the Australian model.

A system now thought of as a baseline democratic norm was, in living memory of those who created it, a colonial export. The phrase Australian ballot still appears in U.S. election-law treatises, vestigial credit for an institutional invention from a hemisphere away.