Secret ballot
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The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by i
Presidential candidate Luis Guillermo Solís votes in the 2014 Costa Rican general election behind a privacy screen which says "The VOTE is SECRET"; Solís was elected president in the election
The Polling by William Hogarth (1755). Before the secret ballot was introduced, voter intimidation was commonplace.
A British "how to vote" card from 1880
New York polling place c. 1900, showing voting booths on the left
Chartism
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Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom that lasted from 1838 to 1857 and was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It took its name from the People's Charter of 1
Secret ballot
…as opposed to simply writing any name on a piece of paper) as well as the voting booth. The demand for a secret ballot was one of the six points of Chartism. The British parliament of the time refused even to consider the Chartist demands. Still, Lord Macaulay, in an 1842 speech, while rejecting Chartism's…
A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848
The meeting of the Birmingham Political Union on 16 May 1832, attended by 200,000
Chartists' riots
The national convention, meeting on Monday 4 February 1839, at the British Coffee House