ONLY IN DELAWARE

This excerpt on the switchover from paper ballots to election machines in 1954 is adapted from Only in Delaware by Celia Cohen. It is taken from a chapter titled, "The Only Thing People Are Talking About."

The 1954 election was the first time voting machines were used statewide. Republican Gov. J. Caleb Boggs and the legislators from his party enacted the law authorizing their use, but it blew up on them.

Stealing votes was a time-honored tradition in the age of paper ballots. Both parties did it, but the Republicans did it better. They had more money to spend.

Vote buying also made it easier to predict election results. Former Superior Court Judge William Swain Lee remembered his grandfather, a political power in Sussex County, estimating the returns. "You had a perfect count," Lee said. "You knew how many Republicans voted, you knew how many Democrats voted, and you knew how many votes you bought."

When the voting machines came in, neither side could hand out marked ballots anymore. There was still some effort to buy voters, but once they got inside the booth, they could choose their own candidates and no one could check up on them.

"Poor people are poor, but they're not stupid. They took the money and voted the way they wanted," said Glenn C. Kenton, a Republican secretary of state during the du Pont administration from 1977 to 1985.

Voting machines were to political corruption what street lights were to crime -- a huge deterrent. Before voting machines there was all manner of ways to commit fraud. The system virtually was set up for it.

The parties had no trouble getting hold of blank ballots to mark in advance. State law provided for it. For every voter in Delaware, there were five ballots printed. One went to the Democratic Party, one to the Republican Party and three to the respective county clerks of the peace.

The practice of handing out marked ballots was so institutionalized, it was described in sanitized fashion in The Delaware Citizen, a 1952 civics book written by Cy Liberman and James M. Rosbrow.

"The political parties in our state give their workers ballots, which the political workers in turn give to voters," Liberman and Rosbrow wrote. "The workers usually mark the ballots in the way they hope the voters will cast their votes. The voter may, if he wishes, get a blank ballot . . . and mark it at the polling place in booths which are put there to give the voter privacy."

What the civics book left out was the money changing hands. State Supreme Court Justice James Tunnell Jr. was disgusted enough by the vote buying to give a speech about it. He explained how a party worker would give a marked ballot to a voter, who would deposit it in the ballot box and return with an unused blank ballot obtained inside the polling place. The voter would be given some cash -- "five dollars or ten dollars or whatever the price may be" -- and the party worker would have another ballot to mark for another voter.

Tunnell called for voting machines or at the very least, a law confining all ballots to polling places.

Littleton P. Mitchell, the longtime president of the Delaware NAACP, remembered vote buying carried out with assembly-line efficiency. The first time he voted in Milford after coming of age, he was stopped on his way to the polls by an African-American man who had a list of all the local black voters. He was working for the Republicans, and he gave Mitchell a marked ballot. Mitchell took it, but he was an independent sort who had no intention of going along with the charade.

"I fixed my own," he said, "and I took that one and tore it up."

Afterwards Mitchell was told to go to a certain house, where a Republican committeeman was distributing five dollars and a half-pint of whiskey for each vote. Mitchell asked what it was for, and the committeeman said, "That's for being a good Republican."

Mitchell got angry. Although he did not drink, he demanded more booty. "If I don't get fifteen dollars and three bottles, I'm going to raise hell," he said. "I'm going to go out here and tell everybody what you are giving me."

Mitchell got his fifteen dollars and three bottles, and no one ever tried to buy his vote again.

There were other ways to steal elections, as well.

In another typical swindle, voters would be paid to cast multiple ballots by traveling to different polling places, pretending to be a different voter each time. Leon C. Bulow, a Republican state senator who owned a cannery, was notorious for loading up a busload of people and taking them around to three Sussex County polling places in Bridgeville, Greenwood and Owens Station.

 There also was wholesale stealing of ballot boxes -- apparently a favorite among Wilmington Democrats. They could not out-buy the Republicans, so at the end of Election Day they simply would substitute a ballot box stuffed with Democratic ballots to replace the official one.

"Democrats were accused of switching ballot boxes. It could have been. It could have been, but I never knew it," said James L. Latchum, a onetime Democratic city chairman who became a federal judge.

Both parties considered vote buying to be great sport, as they tried to outfox each other, but there was also an element of exploitation and suffering to it, particularly among poor black voters. They had so little, their vote was one of the few commodities they had. Herman M. Holloway Jr., a former Democratic state legislator from Wilmington, said votes would be traded for necessities like groceries or bags of coal.

"Politics was survival. What can I get for my vote?" Holloway said.

For Republicans and Democrats alike, the jig was up when the legislature approved voting machines for the 1954 election. The seven Democrats in the Senate tried to stop the roll call by walking out, but their votes were not needed.

Election machines were in. Perhaps it was coincidental, but after voting machines, the Republicans never again controlled the state the way they had before. Perhaps not.

Vote stealing died hard. In 1954 there was a Wilmington polling place set up in a row house with a big picture window. Some city Democrats, standing across the street, watched incredulously as Francis V. Battaglia, a Republican ward chairman, went behind the election-machine curtain with voter after voter. Battaglia had an out, though.

"The law says he can help the handicapped," said Latchum, the Democratic city chairman, "and it's a shame, but all those people in the ward must be handicapped."

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