Secret Ballot Quotes
At the time most legislatures never had recorded votes but instead often depended on voice votes and other methods. Edison’s invention was a huge failure. Transparency was not a popular concept amongst politicians as it still is not, but some standards have changed.
There are many methods of voting in a legislative body. “Viva Voce” is Latin for “by Voice” and is often called a “Voice Vote”. Voting by ballot takes longer but had the advantage or disadvantage of secrecy. The theory was that if the New York Legislators could vote in a secret ballot, the lobbies and special interests would not be as influential since they would never know for sure—unless there were a unanimous vote—how any particular legislator voted. A further advantage is that Party Discipline could not be imposed and parties or “factions” as they were then called would be less powerful—a great concern of all the patriots who tended to distrust parties. The disadvantage was that the people who elected the legislator would never know how he voted. Note the frank admission that this was an “experiment”. Americans of the era realized that almost everything they were doing was a political experiment and this introduced a pragmatic force into structure and procedures of American politics.
The University Presidents had written to the American Public arguing that the German aggression was the result of the militarists in the German society dominating the people and pushing them to war. They argued that most German people were not really responsible. Lamprecht took exception and argued that the German policy was the democratic will of the majority of the German people. He claimed that Germany at the time was more of a de facto democracy than America—as the Untied States did not have a Voting Rights Act or any way of de facto ensuring that all citizens could vote—particularly Negroes in the South. While he was accurate about the voting aspects of a democracy, Germany neither had the Constitution nor a judiciary that was independent and co-equal to the executive and legislature, but Germany did not have the institutions with democratic traditions. The greatest embarrassment to modern Germans is that Adolf Hitler was actually elected by a majority of Germans and was very popular until things in Germany started to go poorly. This quotation is very important in that it shows the importance of a Constitution to limit the powers of even a popularly elected government.
