Ritual and Routine. The Space of the VoteBryan Davies

Student Registration No. 080209230

5 6

5 6

7 8

7 8

11 12

11 12

13 14

13 14

15 16

15 16

12

3 4

5

6

7

17 18

98

10

17 18

11

14 1213

15

20

16

171819

12

3

4

seat of deputy returning officer

assistant handing ballot balls to voter

entrance to ballot box on stage

Agents of candidates look onmaking sure there is no foul play

voter leaving building after vote

voter makes way to stage and ballot box

desk of registration clerkconstables examinecertificates and stopforced entry

1. Voter enters the balloting place, after having certificates checked at the door, and is then registered at the desk.

2.Voter makes his way past the agents of the candidates in the middle pen.

3.Voter places ball in voting machine in one of five holes, hidden from the onlookers by a screen.

4.Voter appears again to the audience and makes his way past them towards the exit.

Chartist Secret Ballot proposal explained.

holes connected to counting mechanism, each one represents a differnt candidate

brass voting ball

partition wall ensuressecrecy for voters

a wooden flap allows presiding officerto count the votes, but prevents thisinformation from being accessed by voters before they cast their ballot ball

counters record the number of votes for each canditate

Chartist voting machine

Perhaps Chartist pamphlets did not communicate the link between electoral reform and the

price of bread as well as they could have. The movement has been criticised for not talking

in the language of the working classes; Chartism failed because it was not sufficient of a

working class movement (Royle, 1980: 93). That is the language of Chartism never outgrew

the language of radicalism and remained assimilated to middle class liberalism; Chartists

were acutely politically aware people, as their writing in their newspapers make clear. We

may presume that some who read those articles were also capable of understanding their

general importance and taking their lessons to heart but we do know how far down the

ranks this sort of political education could penetrate (Royle, 1980: 7). In comparison Wil-

liam Cobbett (1763 -1835) gained massive support by using the language of the pub and the

farmyard in his publication, Cobbetts Weekly Political Register (nicknamed the Tupenny

Trash) to take up the plight of the rural poor (Schama, 2000).

Certainly the Chartist movement petered out, after the arrest and deportation of the key

protagonists as rallies turned into riots, the Newport uprising in Wales saw Chartists take

up arms only to be quickly defeated. Chartism was wound up in 1860 without the reforms

being implemented (Ashley, 2008: 109) and it has been said that its main achievement for

the working class was not the political reforms but in education, Ramsden Balmfort, the son

of a Huddersfield Chartist handloom weaver concluded his verdict of the movement as an

excellent means of political education for the working classes (Royle, 1980: 130).

Why then is it important to understand these issues for this study? I believe they shed light

on why The Peoples Charter may have started with a spatial/architectural proposal. The

drawing of the secret ballot ceremony was, and still is, a way of educating in a manner that

working men could envisage (literacy has been estimated to have been 66 per cent in 1830

based on 35

who could sign their name in the parish register (Suarez and Turner)). The Charter

pamphlet was published by the cabinetmaker William Lovett in May 1838 (Ashley,

2008: 104). I believe Lovett would have had a practical down to earth view, applying

his ability at a craft to generate a physical made solution to the conceptual and legal

problem in hand. Is it any wonder that a large proportion of the drawing is taken up

with a special voting cabinet (an invention attributed on the document to Mr Benjamin

Jolly of York Street, Bath). The illustration painted a picture in the minds eye of what a

fair election might be in the absence of the obvious and familiar aspects of the drinking

and processions of the century before. E.g. it made the electoral process seem more

of an event and spectacle to the layman at the same time as proposing its negation. I

think Lovetts intention was to use the drawing of architectural space to cross class and

educational boundaries.

The Peoples Charter also marks a crux point in the fundamental shift in British social

and political evolution from ritual processions of the common place corrupt elections

that inspired Dickens and Hogarth, to the fairer, ordered democratic elections we now

take for granted. The drawing shows parts of both; the ritual space, the spectacle and

theatrics of the polling literally taking place on a stage in front of an audience, the

drama of the occasion only heightened by the temporary disappearance of the main

protagonist (the voter) behind a screen. But it also includes a secret ballot, using the

cold machinery with dials and accuracy that developed with the rapid machine age,

the routine and logistics of the franchise. The Chartist illustration marks a tipping point

both for the beginnings of electoral reform but also the point at which the scales fell

on the side of rules, secrecy, a deliberate absence of information, colour or ceremony,

towards a veil of neutrality and bureaucracy in the polling station.

28.Peterloo Masacre, 16 August 1819, Manchester, inked drawing, digital copy, (Ashley 2008:100)

36