It’s a bold claim, I know. What if somebody pilfers everyone’s mailboxes for ballots to mail in, then votes on their behalf? What’s to prevent people from taking bids for their votes and sending pictures of their ballots to prove the deed was done? What’s to prevent a harried parent from throwing their ballot at the nearest toddler and letting them fill it out in purple crayon? What about those who don’t have mailing addresses — don’t they get to vote, too? How much will it cost to print and mail ballots for each of Nevada’s voters? What’s to prevent someone from submitting their primary ballot via mail, changing their party registration, and demanding a ballot from the other party’s slate? What if someone with COVID-19 licks an envelope? 

My claim flies in the face of those examining Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s reflexive adoption of mass absentee voting for the upcoming primary election in June. On one hand, you have Republicans that see voter fraud behind every shrub and want to see each ballot cast with a REAL ID, a DNA sample, fingerprints from each hand and a witness verifying that you are of sound mind and patriotism. On another hand, you have Democrats concerned that mail-in ballots privilege those with mailing addresses and silence the voices of abused spouses that would ordinarily be able to cast their ballot in secrecy. On yet another hand, many of us are probably going to be carrying COVID-19 for awhile and don’t need to be breathing in each other’s faces or touching each other’s surfaces if we can avoid it. 

Life, like democracy, is a series of trade-offs. For this coming primary season, our secretary of state has chosen a trade-off that may reduce the likelihood we’ll get each other sick while exercising our franchises. Alternatively, she’s prevented the primaries from becoming a Logan’s Run-style event where only those foolishly confident enough to believe they’ll never get sick are the only ones willing to show up on Election Day, which, as a columnist of this fine publication, I am contractually obligated to claim is the One True Election Day. Either way, our current choices are to either let this year’s primary election look like spring break in Florida or to find some other, somewhat less personal means to cast our ballots. 

Luckily, for all the flaws inherent to balloting by mail — and Republicans and Democrats are right to identify and highlight the flaws — this country has done worse. Since I’m currently reading Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men, Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, some of the more troublesome voting practices of this country are even comparatively fresh on my mind. 

Let’s start with the Three-Fifths Compromise. 

The Three-Fifths Compromise, for those of you who don’t remember grade school history class, granted slave states proportional representation in Congress based on three-fifths of their slave populations, in addition to their free settler populations. What is seldom covered in grade school history class is what this actually meant on a practical level. 

In order to provide proportional representation of any state, our nation conducts a census every decade and counts all the people within the country. Then, congressional district boundaries are drawn, with each district containing a more or less equal number of individuals within the district. Before the Civil War, however, it meant that congressional districts were drawn around populations of slaves (well, three-fifths of them, anyway), which meant it wasn’t uncommon for some Southern congressional districts to have only a very small number of well-heeled plantation owners who could legally vote. Additionally, since there was already precedent for the idea of counting slaves to determine political apportionment, some states applied the same principle to state legislative districts, which, like Nevada’s today, were much smaller than their congressional districts. 

Unsurprisingly, with plantation owners being even more ridiculously overrepresented at the state and local levels than they were in Congress, and with their political fortunes dependent upon a business model that explicitly stripped the individual liberties of anyone they could lash, they made it a point to adopt some of the most anti-democratic measures imaginable. State representatives in South Carolina, for example, were required to have 500 acres and 10 slaves or real estate valued at 150 pounds sterling clear of debt, while state senators had to have a minimum of estate valued at 300 pounds sterling, also clear of debt. Additionally, representation in pre-antebellum South Carolina’s legislature was apportioned based on property value in addition to resident population, so South Carolinian plantation owners received even more representation than they otherwise would have. 

Who in South Carolina was eligible to vote for a plantation owner-legislator of their choice? You had to be male, at least twenty-one years of age or older, a citizen of the state for at least two years, and a resident of your district for at least six months. “Paupers” were explicitly forbidden from voting. Elected leaders were so beholden to democratic norms that Gov. James Henry Hammond even bragged that, in South Carolina, the right to vote had been exercised “very negligently […] from time immemorial.”

What was true in South Carolina was also true in other slave states, though the details differed slightly. Some states had property requirements (North Carolina required white male voters to own at least 50 acres when “forty acres and a mule” was considered more than sufficient to secure a middle-class lifestyle until 1857). Misdemeanors, to say nothing of felonies, frequently stripped the franchise from otherwise eligible voters. Poll taxes, which usually cost at least a day’s wages for most farm workers, were routine. 

Now, let’s say you were a white male property owner with a quarter in your pocket to pay your poll tax. What was the voting process like? Several southern states used viva voce voting, or “by word of mouth.” Under this practice, each man’s name and vote was read aloud. Then, a local official, who was politically connected, would record both the voter’s name and the candidates the voter had voted for. 

Compared to viva voce voting, which was the law of the land in several southern states for a century, mail-in ballots are an obvious upgrade. 

Lest we pretend that the South had a unique monopoly on terrible voting processes, Rhode Island experienced an armed uprising in 1842 over overly restrictive eligibility requirements, as I briefly discussed when I endorsed Question 5 in 2018. Urban political machines, meanwhile, which were much more common in the industrializing North, enforced desired voting behavior through patronage, bribery, or letting the dead vote. This behavior finally ended in… oh, apparently it didn’t end, as Salon, a decidedly left-leaning publication, detailed in a report about election fraud in Chicago, political home of former President Barack Obama.

It all kind of puts the six people — six! — investigated for voter fraud a couple years ago in Clark County into perspective, doesn’t it?

It’s true that we shouldn’t let terrible be the enemy of good and, for all of Nevada’s faults, we ordinarily have a surprisingly good voting system that is relatively free of fraud and incompetence. We shouldn’t all vote by mail under ordinary circumstances because we shouldn’t all be forced into any specific electoral system. For some, voting by mail is more appropriate than voting by person a week early, which, in turn, is more appropriate than voting by person on Election Day. 

However, these aren’t ordinary times. In the here and now, we need to have a timely election and we need to not get each other sick. Since we don’t know whether or we’ll be able to safely go out in public before June, it’s wholly appropriate for the secretary of state to plan for the worst, especially as elections aren’t something you can just throw together at the last minute. That’s why there’s no need to let perfect be the enemy of good, either. With hindsight, we will undoubtedly come up with better ways to manage elections in the middle of a pandemic, but until then, we’re going to have to get through this as best we can with imperfect information pushing us toward imperfect systems. 

And until then, we can just remind ourselves that George Washington, one of the best presidents we ever had, was victorious in every election he ever won by getting each and every one of his voters hilariously drunk.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].