The Importance Of Voting In The 1800's

With the Presidential Election fast approaching once more, America is again reminded of the importance of the vote in our democratic society. Equal rights allows everyone to cast their vote on who should be moved into power. But it was not always like that. It is common knowledge that due to voting qualifications woman haven 't always enjoyed the luxury of participating in political affairs nor have African-Americans. However it is less known that even some adult white males were excluded from the realm of governmental affairs. During the early 1800’s, several restrictions and property qualifications eliminated many except those who were more well off. But was leaving the majority of voting to the elite’s fair? Would their influence not cause an unfair election? Only putting in those from certain political parties till the government was composed of largely one or the other? And what would happen when those restrictions fell and the ballots were flooded with the previously exempt? With all these questions was there any way to have a just election? All these questions can be answered in Richard P. McCormick’s “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments,” Or “A Study in Voter Behavior.” McCormick writes fondly of America and might even be said to believe in American Exceptionalism. He conducted his experiment with the purpose of it to be “An analysis of the degree to which certain types of property qualifications restricted the size of the electorate and of the relationship of the economic status of voters to their party affiliation.” For most states it would be a difficult task to conduct the experiment with any amount of certainty because the nature of their elections make it impossible to have a well organized study. However McCormick found two states whose conditions would be agreeable for his study. Such states were North Carolina and New York. North Carolina and New York both operated under a system known as a dual suffrage system which allowed voters reaching the minimum of the qualifications could only vote for certain official positions while those reaching the maximum could vote for all official positions. North Carolina was divided by those who owned fifty acres of land within the county where the vote was taking place versus those who did not. Those who did could vote for a member of the state senate and members of the house of commons. Those who did not could only vote for members of the house of commons. Similarly in New York the electorate was divided into those who owned freeholds that were valued at £100 vs those whose were valued at £20 or paid public taxes and rented tenements with an annual value of forty shillings. Those who had a value of £100 could vote for governors, lieutenant governors, state senators, assemblymen and Congress members. While those who only had a freehold with a value of £20 could only vote for assemblymen and Congress members. These, according to McCormick, served to create the different classes of electors. In order to tackle many of the questions concerning voting, McCormick researched the number total votes, the number of votes for each position, and how many counties were involved in the sample in every election from 1835-56. With this information he could calculate the ratio between those who could only vote for limited categories vs those who could vote for all. For North Carolina, this research, when compared with the fact that voter participation was 83% of the adult white male population at the time, indicates that the minimal qualification …show more content…
After all if both classes were, for the most part, of the same mindset for party alignments what would be affected when they added more classes? McCormick was able to research the this using the liberalization of the suffrage that occurred in 1822 in New York. During this time several restrictions were removed so that the percentage of those eligible to vote leapt from 33 to 84 percent. However apart from the number of electorate participators increasing, not much else changed. McCormick found that despite the enlargement there was no measurable differences in party alignments. Further reinforcing the notion that suffrage classes had little or no impact on the party alignments of the