Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: tina07

Flag staffs?

In 1860, Lincoln wasn’t printed on Southern states’ ballots.

Northern states elected Lincoln as President.

Look how that turned out the following year...


20 posted on 12/21/2023 11:50:31 PM PST by Does so ( πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦..."Christian-Nationalists" won WWII...Biden NOT DNC nominee!t)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies ]


To: Does so
It's not just that Lincoln was not on the ballot in 10 states. In 1860 and earlier, there were no standard ballots provided by the states; the candidates themselves had to print and distribute the ballots themselves.

The ballots were simply lists of names of the Electors who were pledged to the candidate. The voter would "vote" the list. The candidates would distribute the lists and the people would vote the one they preferred.

In the southern states, printers refused to print ballots for the Lincoln campaign, and people were afraid to submit them for fear of being shunned or physically attacked.

It was intimidation tactics like this that section 2 of the 14th Amendment was intended to address.

From Wikipedia: 1860 United States presidential election:

Excerpt:

One key difference between modern elections and those of the mid-nineteenth century is that at the time the state did not print and distribute ballots. In theory, any document containing a valid or at least non-excessive number names of citizens of a particular state (provided they were eligible to vote in the electoral college within that state) might have been accepted as a valid presidential ballot; however, what this meant in practice was that a candidate's campaign was responsible for printing and distributing their own ballots (this service was typically done by supportive newspaper publishers).

Moreover, since voters did not choose the president directly, but rather presidential electors, the only way for a voter to meaningfully support a particular candidate for president was cast a ballot for citizens of his state who would have pledged to vote for the candidate in the Electoral College. In ten southern slave states, no citizen would publicly pledge to vote for Abraham Lincoln, so citizens there had no legal means to vote for the Republican nominee. In most of Virginia, no publisher would print ballots for Lincoln's pledged electors.

While a citizen without access to a ballot for Lincoln could theoretically have still voted for him by means of a write-in ballot provided his state had electors pledged to Lincoln and the voter knew their identities, casting a ballot in favor of the Republican candidate in a strongly pro-slavery county would have incurred (at minimum) social ostracization (of course, casting a vote for Breckinridge in a strongly abolitionist county ran a voter the same risk).

-PJ
21 posted on 12/22/2023 12:04:31 AM PST by Political Junkie Too ( * LAAP = Left-wing Activist Agitprop Press (formerly known as the MSM))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies ]

To: Does so
The Colorado Supreme Court taking Trump off the Presidential election ballot raises many questions:

Has anything like this ever happened before
Allowing for mild generalization of the 'like this,' Yes!

How many times before have states banned major party Presidential candidates from their ballot?
IIRC, ten times

That many times! What were the partisan makeups of the officials doing the banning and the banned candidates?
IIRC, in all cases it has been Democrat party election officials banning Republican party candidates.

How well did those bans work out in those elections?
Not very well. The banned candidate, Lincoln, won the election!

Was there insurrection?
* Yes! In pretty much every case of the earlier banning the officials were guilty of insurrection.

Should the new banners be worried about that?
Yes, the Colorado judges banning Trump are arguably at least as covered by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment as was President Trump.

* Most, if not all, of those state officials banning Lincoln from their ballots subsequently seceded from the Union and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War against the Union they'd previously sworn to uphold. Whether their actions just in banning Lincoln from their ballots, prior to secession, were enough to constitute 'insurrection' depends on how broadly one defines 'insurrection.' The Colorado judges used it very broadly and officially banning an otherwise qualified candidate just because they didn't like what he had freely, Constitutionally, spoken is a much stronger action than any action taken by Trump on J6.

35 posted on 12/22/2023 1:22:47 PM PST by JohnBovenmyer (Biden/Harris events are called dodo ops)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson