When Voters Were Identified by Goiters, Missing Fingers and Tattoos

Fewer polling places and myriad candidates await California voters in the gubernatorial recall election, but for all the obstacles, voting may be less complicated than it was 100 years ago. Then, the official system for identifying voters relied on a logbook of their descriptions and deformities.

Beginning in 1892, well before the driver’s license became a universal form of identification, copperplate handwritten logs gave physical descriptions of voters, often noting missing limbs and other characteristics inflicted by a rough-and-tumble frontier life.

In leather and canvas-bound voter registration books kept under lock and key at a Los Angeles museum are “the great registers,” decades’ worth of the county’s voter rolls from 1866 to 1908. The rosters include each voter’s birthplace and, if he wasn’t born in the U.S., the date he was naturalized.

William M. Hamlin was described as missing his “4th finger on his left hand and his 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers on his right hand,” while plumber Harry Ellsworth Dascomb was registered with an “artificial left eye,” according to inky entries in the 1892 and 1896 voter registration books -- years when Grover Cleveland and then William McKinley were elected president.

Irish immigrant Richard Dwyer and Missouri-born Charles Herman Brown were each missing a left foot. Henry Judson Ball, a merchant, had a “ballet girl tattooed on his left arm.” Henry Drake was mute. Real estate salesman Casper Caesar Cohn had “locomotion of the eyes,” and Edward Griffiths, 22, had a “cork left leg.” Andrew Boton Gillett was a 6-foot-1 gardener whose sole description was “Negro” -- the only black voter listed in the 1892 register.

Such vivid nuggets are found in the registration books at the Seaver Center for Western History Research, in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. They are relics of a time when reformers tried to clean up corrupt election procedures in the wake of frequent and wide-scale vote-buying. Under the original state Constitution, eligible voters were “white males of U.S. citizenship” and, because of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, “Mexicans 21 years of age.” Voters had to have lived in California for at least six months and in the county where they were voting at least 30 days. Native Americans could not vote.

Before formal voter registration began in California in 1866, counties did not print official ballots with the names of all candidates. Voters simply cast a ballot with a “vest pocket ticket,” which was printed by a political party and bore the names of only that party’s candidates. Democratic tickets were one color, Republican tickets another.

County employees and volunteers noted voters’ descriptions to discourage fraud. The most commonly used descriptors were pockmarks, portly, bald, scars, moles, tattoos, bullet holes, hunchback, missing teeth, gold teeth, burn marks, club feet, massive goiters, artificial eyes and limbs and “felon scar” -- meaning an inflammation or infection beneath the skin that had been lanced and healed over, according to historian Gary Zeller of Montgomery College in Woodlands, Texas.

In 1892, Los Angeles’ deputy “zanjero,” whose title meant he helped to oversee water distribution, was Michael Andrew Dickman. His voter identification: “piece out of left ear.” In Los Angeles’ 1906 mayoral election, “even the dead got to the polls on time,” said Tom Sitton, Seaver Center curator and author of “John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive.” In that election, railroad workers were accused of voting twice, using names they had copied from local tombstones.

In his run for office that year, mayoral candidate Arthur Harper had the backing of the Southern Pacific Railroad and its workers. Once elected, Harper fostered a sugar company stock swindle to line his own pockets, took payoffs from casinos, and was often found drunk in brothels.

Such conduct prompted a recall drive, and Harper resigned while it was in progress. His misdeeds were too repugnant for the city to tolerate, especially after cronies tried to steal the bed of the Los Angeles River for private purposes.

That wasn’t the first time political maneuvering and voter fraud went on in the City of Angels -- which is one of the reasons officials began recording voters’ descriptions. Henry O’Melveny, founder of the law firm that still bears his name, witnessed some strong-arm tactics in 1872: The Southern Pacific Railroad threatened to bypass Los Angeles, which could have harmed the city’s future.

The railroad demanded $600,000 in incentives to bring its line into Los Angeles. O’Melveny’s father, Harvey, was the chairman of a 30-member committee that worked out plans for a $377,000 bond issue and a 60-acre land grant to comply. The plans, which many residents opposed, were subject to a special election. More than 80% of the city’s residents were Latinos, O’Melveny wrote in his memoirs, and they “not only did not understand the questions submitted at the election, but they did not care. It was just the common, ordinary practice to buy their votes.”

The night before the election, O’Melveny wrote, anti-railroad forces rounded up “[200 or 300] Mexicans whose votes they had purchased,” but “the pro-railroad people, during the night, offered a larger price and bought the votes.”

Because ballots could be bought, stolen, miscounted, lost and thrown out, county supervisors hired official poll watchers. But to make sure that even they could not be swayed to look the other way, the progressive wing of the Republican Party hired trusted individuals “to man the precincts and make sure no hanky-panky went on,” Sitton said. The Democrats did the same. The result was that Los Angeles’ vote-counting resembled Florida’s in 2000, with dozens of observers hanging over the shoulders of vote-counters.

California women won the right to vote in the October 1911 election that swept in 23 reforms, including the regulation of public utilities and the recall process, which California is now exercising.

Women’s suffrage won by a statewide margin of 3,587 votes -- about one vote per precinct -- making California the sixth state to give women the vote. That marked the end of the old handwritten ledgers because the number of registered voters nearly doubled. Registrars no longer had time to write detailed physical descriptions. Simple index cards replaced the ledgers.

Women would not win the right to vote in national elections for another nine years.

For the upcoming recall election, experts are predicting that California’s electoral system will lead to delays and disarray. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Politicians embraced a new technology in the 1920s, using adding machines to tabulate election results. In 1928, the Board of Supervisors bought 150 mechanically operated counters for a total of $225,000. All a voter had to do was flip the lever alongside the candidate’s name.

The machines worked well in small elections, but didn’t have the capacity to list all the candidates in larger elections. Each thousand-pound hunk of metal, known as an “automatic,” was consigned to storage and later sold to San Francisco for 15 cents on the dollar.

In 1949, the county Board of Supervisors voted to buy 200 Shoups -- named after the Ransom Shoup family in Pennsylvania. Each clunky voting machine had thousands of parts and cost $1,500. The machine could handle a ballot 10 columns wide, with 50 rows of names in each column, but it still wasn’t big enough.

Soon the Shoups were gathering dust in county warehouses. Although a few labor unions rented them for their own elections, the cost of transporting and setting them up was just too high. In 1953, the county sold them to smaller cities for $180,000 -- a net loss of $120,000.

In the late 1950s, Los Angeles County sank nearly $1 million into developing a prototype “dream counter,” an electronic vote-tallying device. The county earned almost $200,000 in royalties when the machine went into production. But within a few years the machines needed expensive improvements and county officials refused to sink any more money into the project.

In 1962, Joseph P. Harris, a political science professor at UC Berkeley, came up with the idea of listing the candidates and issues on a single standard IBM card and putting it into a ballot holder. The result was the “Votomatic,” which he sold to IBM six years later. The method is still in use today, “chads” and all.

Although the machines are considered “obsolete, antiquated and unacceptable” and the state decertified their use as of March 2004, several counties plan to use them Oct. 7 -- including Los Angeles.