Who Did Your Ancestors Vote For? Before 1872 It Was Printed

Voting before the secret ballot was done by declaring a choice aloud to officials at the hustings, who wrote it down. The resulting record listed each voter by name, frequently with their address, their occupation and the property qualifying them to vote, followed by which candidate or candidates they had supported. Those records were then printed and sold commercially, because there was a market for them among candidates, agents, landlords and anybody else with an interest in knowing how particular individuals had voted. Publication was not a leak but the ordinary practice.

Historians and genealogists use them heavily and for different purposes:

• •Establishing where an individual lived and what they did
• •Tracing how voting divided by occupation, street and trade
• •Measuring how consistently voters supported the same interest
• •Identifying pressure, where whole categories voted identically
• •Filling the gap between census returns, which are decennial
• •Documenting who qualified, which shows how narrow the franchise was

Recording and publishing choices had exactly the effects that might be expected, and the evidence for them is in the books themselves. Tenants voting against a landlord's wishes could be evicted, and cases of it are documented. Tradesmen voting against the interest of their customers lost business, and organised exclusive dealing was used deliberately as a weapon. Employers instructed workers. Analysis of the records shows striking uniformity within some landlord estates and within some trades, which is not plausibly voluntary agreement. Bribery was also far easier to organise when a payer could verify delivery, which is the argument that finally carried the secret ballot.

The books record only those entitled to vote, which is a small and specific slice of the population and has to be kept in mind when using them. Before 1832 the qualification varied enormously between constituencies, with some boroughs having a handful of electors and others several thousand, and county voting restricted to holders of freehold land above a stated value. Reform in 1832, 1867 and 1884 extended the franchise in stages and still left a majority of adult men and all women excluded. So a list showing uniform voting in a street records the choices of the qualified householders and says nothing about anybody else living there.

The secret ballot was introduced in Britain by legislation in 1872, after decades of argument in which the case against secrecy was that voting was a public trust to be exercised openly and answerably, not a private preference. That argument was serious and was made by people who disliked intimidation but thought concealment worse. What settled it was accumulated evidence that open voting delivered coercion rather than accountability. The practice of publishing lists ended with it, and the books stop. Many countries made the same change over the same period, and the Australian innovation of a state-printed ballot listing all candidates was adopted widely.

Voters declared a choice aloud, officials recorded it with name, address and occupation, and the lists were printed and sold, which was ordinary practice rather than a leak. The books now supply detail between census years and reveal uniform voting within estates and trades that was not voluntary. Secrecy arrived in Britain in 1872, against an argument that voting was a public trust.