Before the secret ballot, anyone could print a “ticket” or slate of candidates and distribute it to voters to cast it as their vote. Political parties struggled to control their nominations and voters in this environment.  Parties faced competition from splinter parties and interest groups, who would print their own tickets with some of the party's nominated candidates but not others. Their tickets, printed carefully and at great expense to the party, were also frequently altered by tenacious voters and breakaway candidates who would use “pasters” to insert alternative candidates to the ticket.

Competing Tickets

Political parties printed their own tickets with their slate of nominated candidates. But so did third parties, candidates, and interest groups. These tickets would often “borrow” major party candidates.  Below is the “regular” Republican ticket from the 1888 presidential election in California’s sixth district and the “Regular Cactus” ticket. If you look closely, you can see the Cactus ticket (a pro-labor group) borrowed Republican nominees for many offices, but inserted their own local candidates.

In another example, the Independent Tax Payers’ Union in California printed (at least) two tickets each district in San Francisco in 1869: One with their preferred candidates for the city election and the Republican Party legislative candidates; the other with the Democratic Party legislative candidates. 

In response to competition from other tickets, political parties made their tickets more distinctive, more colorful, and printed on both sides of the page, so that their “poll watchers” could monitor voters and see which tickets they were voting. Below is a Republican (“Union”) ticket from the 1864 presidential election in Ohio. Note the bright printing on the back, which would have aided poll watchers monitoring the election and ensure that the voter’s vote was not a secret. 

These efforts helped parties keep some control over elections, but they were imperfect. Printing in color was expensive and the designs time consuming. Plus voters, interest groups, and candidates still found ways to vote other tickets and alter party tickets.

Altering Tickets 

Using “pasters” to alter tickets was a common practice in the 19th century. The term “paster” refers to a rectangle with a different candidate’s name printed on it that was pasted over the spot where a party nominated candidate appeared on the party ticket. Candidates who missed out on or did not seek a party nomination – as well as newspapers and interest groups – would distribute pasters to voters. Voters could also scratch out names and try to write legibly their preferred candidate over the top, but that was riskier than pasting. It also required being able to write (a less common skill in the 19th century). Both these practices frustrated political parties immensely.

In response to pasters, political parties began to print their tickets in very “artistic” and imaginative ways so that their nominated candidates’ names could not easily be covered by a rectangle paster without obscuring the names of other candidates or the office being voted for.

Perhaps the most famous example of political parties’ attempts at preventing voters from splitting their tickets comes from Vallejo in California, where the local Republican Party came up with the “tapeworm ticket” in 1871: A ticket so small and crammed with text that no voter could alter it with a candidate of choice.

An Easier Way to Control Nominations

Taken together, political parties were expending an impressive amount of effort to preserve their tickets in the 19th century and were eager to find new ways to gain control back.

Political parties started to hear about something called the “Australian Ballot” and it understood that it would help them out in their battle to control nominations. After its adoption in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, the secret ballot quickly spread to Massachusetts in 1889 and across the country.  There were only seven states still using the old ticket system in 1900, with South Carolina completing the US' switch to the Australian ballot in 1950. 

Once the secret ballot was in place, parties adapted it to serve their purpose by creating party columns, party icons, check boxes to vote the straight party ticket, and high entrance requirements for new political parties… and, of course, the county line ballot in New Jersey.

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For more about how political parties used the secret ballot to serve their own ends, read Alan Ware’s impressive work (behind a paywall) or visit the "Social Logic" website at the University of Virginia.