democracy. It contends that, on the contrary, the Australian sense of democ-
racy is undeveloped.
8.1 The Secret Ballot
Australia claims parentage of the secret ballot, and the world rightly concedes
the claim by having it called for many years the‘Australian ballot’(Crook and
Crook 2011). It was in 1856 that Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia
almost simultaneously introduced provisions for the modern secret ballot.
This inauguration ofsecretballot voting was not, of course, thefirst use of
ballot voting in the modern world. The USA had commonly adopted ballot
voting in the wake of the American Revolution.^4 This‘American ballot’was
not secret, as, typically, voters presented themselves to the polling officer with
a ballot that had been produced and supplied by the candidate they favoured,
and which was of a distinctive appearance. This did not necessarily prevent
the revelation of the voter’s vote when they wished to conceal it, and it
accommodated the revelation of the voter’s vote when they wished to disclose
it. Thus, if American ballot voting afforded some impediment to the intimi-
dation of voters, it was little bar to their bribery, and bribery was endemic.
Nevertheless, one variant of ballot voting effectively secured secrecy a few
years before the Australian schema. In 1851 Massachusetts required that
ballots be placed in envelopes of uniform appearance before being submitted
to electoral officers, and the scheme was judged in the event to serve secrecy
‘very well’(Brunet 1952).
Yet what today is universally recognized as a secret ballot only arrived as the
gift to posterity of the Legislative Council of Victoria of 1856. After a debate of
‘extreme crudity’, the dubiously democratic Council resolved to introduce a
secret ballot. But at this point the Council found that it‘had not the faintest
idea’(Scott 1920, p. 11) of how such a ballot would actually be effected. The
vague talk in the chamber of‘urns’,‘marbles’, and ‘peas’indicates how
unapparent to these law-makers were the procedures that we take for granted.
But opportunely one of the Council’s members, Henry Chapman, drafted an
elaborate but lucid statement of the procedures of secret ballot voting that
would be recognized today. The one deviation from the familiar was that the
legislation required voters to cross out the names of the candidates they did
not want, rather than cross the name of the candidate they favoured. It was
South Australia’s 1858 revision of its own initial secret ballot legislation that,
at the instigation of the colony’s Returning Officer, William Boothby, required
(^4) New York state in 1776, for example.‘By 1787–1788 nine states had substantially adopted the
practice’of ballot voting (Ratcliffe 2013, p. 234).
William O. Coleman