“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” — Abraham Lincoln

ELECTION DAY, AMERICA, 1820 — “Step right up men! It’s time once again to make your voice heard. Today we shall re-elect the honorable James Monroe as president of these United States. All those in favor of Monroe, move to this side of the common.

“Wait, William Cranshaw? You’re not with us? Step over here, Will, Our men have a few libations, maybe even some coins, that might change your mind. The rest of you stand still while we count heads. . .”

Democracy in America was a patchwork process, woven on the fly. The Constitution leaves “the times, places and manner of elections” up to the states. Even the date, until 1845, varied by state. Then it was fixed on that unexplainable “first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” So here we go again.

By late Tuesday night, some 150 million ballots — about half cast early or absentee — will be ready for counting. No one will know who any citizens voted for. No one will be paid — in liquor or cash — to vote a straight party ticket. It was not always so.

The times, places, and manner of our elections, though often seeming arbitrary, are today more “small d” democratic than they once were.

First, consider who votes. The Constitution was at its most radical when it set no property requirements for voting. Nor any for gender. Few men without property voted at first, yet women voted into the early 1800s. Then, state-by-state, their right was denied. But while disenfranchising women, states began to expand voting beyond “gentlemen of property standing.”

In 1800, among 5 million citizens, just 600,000 were eligible to vote and just 65,000 did. By 1824, uniquely among the world’s democracies, men without property could vote in all but a few states. Just 85,000 voted in 1820, but in 1824, the rolls swelled to a quarter million. Four years later, voting topped a million. Critics of democacy denounced “King Numbers,” but the door was open.

All these voters were men, of course. White men. Pressure on that injustice emerged in 1848 at Seneca Falls, NY when Susan B. Anthony and friends (including Frederick Douglass) began calling for women’s suffrage. A Declaration of Sentiments modeled on that other Declaration, proclaimed: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

— He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. . .”

The call would continue for seven decades.

Meanwhile an equally overdue expansion of voting emerged from the slaughter of the Civil War. On Election Day in 1867, an Alabama man watched in amazement: “There must have been present, near one thousand freedmen, many as far as thirty miles from their home, all eager to vote.”

Over the next decade, freed black (men) voted throughout the South, electing 1,500 former slaves as mayors, sheriffs, state reps, plus 21 Congressmen and three U.S. senators. It was, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “the dawn of freedom.” But sunset came quickly.

Vigiliante violence, led by an upstart Klan, crushed the black vote. Jim Crow laws buried it. Although the secret ballot finally emerged in the 1890s, by no stretch of the word could America be called a democracy.

But “democracy cannot be static,” Eleanor Roosevelt observed. “Whatever is static is dead.”

Enter the women. Still marching, still picketing, now going to jail and waging hunger strikes, women finally won the right to vote in 1920. Four years later, Native-Americans were, without the slightest hint of irony, declared citizens of their own lands, and given the vote. By 1940, in a nation of 132 million, nearly 50 million voted.

And on it went, the marching, the struggling, the demand for the vote. Only after a decade of Civil Rights uprising was Jim Crow finally defeated at the ballot box. First, in 1964, the 24th amendment outlawed the “poll tax” which had required voters to pay annual fees to remain on the polls. The following year came the Voting Rights Act. Signing it into law, with Martin Luther King and others looking on, LBJ spared no praise.

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield. . . Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.”

In our “today,” however, the vote remains up for grabs. Since 2013, when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, the myth of “voter fraud” has sparked legislation challenging the spread of democracy. Voter ID laws. Restrictions on mail-in ballots. Polling places closed. Democracy in America is no longer for sale but it is still on trial.

And yet, 2020 saw the highest voter turnout rate in a century, nearly 2/3 of eligible voters. And that other third? And the millions who maintain, despite the rulings of 60 courts, that the 2020 election was stolen? Lincoln weeps.

So step right up, America. The lines form to the center, right, and left. Voting in America, expanded, retracted, expanded again, remains our most cherished right and our most battered political football. Have we come this far, opened this many doors, fought this many injustices, to surrender our democracy now? Stay tuned.

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THE VICTORY OF VOTING