Blocks of Five
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The Blocks of Five were groups of electors whose selling of their votes to the United States Republican Party for voting in the United States presidential election, 1888 was exposed.
[edit] Background
In the Gilded Age, prior to the adoption of the secret ballot in Federal elections, political parties printed up ballots and distributed them to their voters, who then cast them at their polling station.
The Republican campaign, William Wade Dudley, send out a circular on October 24 to Indiana Republican officials. In it, he told them to "divide the floaters [Vote sellers] into blocks of five" and appoint a more integral leader who would be given the money to pay them with for their fraud.
The plan was exposed when a railroad official turned one up and it was subsequently publicized. The Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, was elected anyway.
The publicity of the notoriously brazen fraud is credited with aiding in the adoption of the secret ballot by the states.
[edit] Sources
- Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940
- The Object at Hand: The Vote That Failed — Smithsonian Magazine
