Voting in the Keystone State: the First 200 Years

The Pennsylvania legislature considered two major changes to the laws that govern how we vote. For several years, Republicans have sought various means to ensure election integrity, in part by voters showing identification each time they vote. Republican legislators prefer using only government-issued cards, though the courts have struck down such laws in 2012. Democrats, led by state House Speaker Joanna McClinton, dropped their objections to voter ID but have broadened identification to ensure that the state not disenfranchise poor citizens, so voters could use a utility bill, among other options. There would also be expanded early voting, same-day registration, and allowance of at least two drop boxes per county, and other measures regarding mail-in ballots. As it stands, the grand deal between House Democrats and Senate Republicans has hit a snag and it’s unclear if it will move forward. 

Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony where the Penn family appointed the governor. By 1683, William Penn directed elections to be held. Sheriffs were “to summon all freeholders” who would elect seven representatives per county, hopefully those with the most “wisdom, sobriety and integrity.” In 1696, more assembly elections were held and voters were limited to those with 50 acres of land, at least ten of which was cleared. Or they could own 50 pounds of real property. There were more small farmers who owned land than urban workers with 50 pounds of property, so in the colonial era, the electorate skewed rural.

It is worth considering that immigrants were not excluded from the rolls. Indeed, many Pennsylvanians were born elsewhere. Until the Revolution, even those born here considered themselves British. Unlike most colonies, Pennsylvania had no state church, so there was no religious bar to vote or hold office.

Moreover, the electorate was small; voters and officeholders often knew each other personally. Benjamin Franklin recalled that his elections to the assembly, from Philadelphia, the largest city in the colony, “was repeated every year for ten years, without my ever asking any elector for his vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any desire of being chosen.” 

Elections in rural areas were even more intimate. Initially, voting was often done by voice.  As early as 1706, tabulation was required due to disputed elections. Records were kept with corn or beans. Thus, from early on, accusations of voting irregularities led to changes in the rules.

Pennsylvania’s revolutionary Constitution of 1776 was a remarkable document that followed the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. The property restriction was dropped; all freemen over age 21 who paid taxes could vote. The unicameral legislature was the supreme authority, and it elected a president and a council to function as an executive branch. Immigrants were allowed to vote after one year if they swore a loyalty oath to the state. Many members of religious sects, often German speaking, eschewed oaths, and thus did not vote. The Constitution allowed freedom of religion but also required an oath affirming the Bible as divinely inspired. The 1776 Constitution included many protections that presaged those of the Bill of Rights a decade later. 

Pennsylvania rewrote its Constitution in 1790. It created a governor and extended the earlier Constitution’s guidance on voting.  During the first gubernatorial election, in the same year, almost 31,000 voters cast their ballot. Thus, after revolution, and intense democratic ferment, about a quarter of free men met paid taxes and thus could vote. While women could not vote, nor Indians, black men could. The requirement that voters were also taxpayers, what we would know as a poll tax, remained the law of the land until 1933.

In the young republic, many of the features that we associate with elections were absent. Ballots were not printed by the government but were provided to the voters by a political party, so most voted a straight party line. Voters deposited their colored ballots into the box after carrying it proudly through a jostling, sometimes hostile, and generally inebriated, crowd. Voters who found themselves in the minority were expected to man up and fight their way to the ballot box.

Parties organized torch-light parades with bands, with their supporting clubs (such as fire companies) demonstrating their patriotism and partisan vigor. Election Day was closer to Mardi Gras than our solemn, quiet, and personal voting. For good and for ill, elections and partisanship were intensely public and based in community.

Immigrants had to become naturalized to vote, but that process was considerably more informal than today. Throughout the first hundred years of the republic, the federal government did little to regulate immigration. Before 1891, immigrants who resided in the U.S. for five years, and one or two years in the community, could go before a judge, any judge, and get their naturalization papers. Such laissez faire attitudes were not extended to black Pennsylvanians.

In 1838, a new state Constitution stripped black men of the franchise. Voting was closed to all but free white men who paid their poll tax. Black Pennsylvanians objected, pointing out that they paid more than a million dollars in taxes. Moreover, mob violence was a disturbing sign of the times during Jacksonian populism. In 1838, abolitionists, black and white, completed Pennsylvania Hall at a cost of $40,000, a grand building in downtown Philadelphia. Four days after it opened, the police stood by while an anti-black mob burned it down. Fire companies did nothing to help, when one company tried to put out the fire, the others attacked them.

Black Pennsylvanians would not regain their right to vote until the passage of the 15th Amendment, in 1870.  Even then, anti-black mobs attacked black voters, such as Union army veteran Octavius Catto, who was killed while attempting to vote in 1871. The struggle against black citizenship, often associated with Jim Crow in the South, clearly had its Northern counterpart.

The Civil War saw a significant voting reform: mail-in ballots for soldiers.  The Commonwealth had allowed soldiers to vote by mail during the War of 1812.  This policy continued, albeit on a larger scale, during the Civil War. Harper’s Magazine printed a drawing of Pennsylvania soldiers voting by mail in October 1864.

The period after the Civil War was a gloomy one for election integrity. Before the war, the country was a nation of farmers, merchants, and mechanics. The richest men were Southern slave owners, one or two owned a thousand souls and were the oligarchs of their day. During the war, the federal government encouraged the rise of big businesses to build weapons or munitions, to ship goods via railroads. By the war’s end, a handful of companies employed thousands, or tens of thousands. The wealth and power of these men would dwarf the economic and political power of the old “slave power.”

In the decades after the war, numerous company towns emerged in the coal patches where miners lived in company houses and were paid in company script. The situation was little better in small cities run by steel companies or railroads. The police, and often the law, were extensions of the company.  

Life in a company town was described by one Pullman worker in 1883: “We are born in a Pullman house. We are fed from a Pullman shop, taught in a Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church and when we die we shall be buried in a Pullman cemetery and go to a Pullman hell." In this context, the antebellum system of partisan ballots was open to manipulation, and the big companies and political machines flagrantly controlled the ballot box. 

The Constitution of 1873 allowed ballots to be signed, or numbered, both of which allowed the powerful to know how someone voted. The author Eldon Cobb Evans observed in 1922 that this system was open to fraud and abuse. The system of a secret paper ballot provided by the state was some decades away.  And effective laws to ensure honest elections would wait until 1937. 

The industrial period did much to transform Pennsylvania, making its politics a byword for corruption. We will explore how that era, and how we moved to clean elections, in a subsequent essay.

John Hinshaw is a Professor of History at Lebanon Valley College