(001) In 1635-36, Massachusetts granted to the frontier towns
"liberty to stay so many of their freemen at home for the safety of their
towne as they judge needful, and that the said freemen that are appointed by
the towne to stay at home shall have liberty for this court to send their
voices by proxy."
(002) According to Charles Seymour
and Donald Paige Frary, had not proxy voting been implemented, the inhabitants
of the frontier towns would have lost their franchises, and the government
would have represented only the freemen in the vicinity of Boston.
(003) The roads were poor; the
drawing of all a village's men at once would have exposed it to Indian attacks;
and at election time, the emigrants' labor was needed to get the spring
planting into the ground.
(004) As late as 1680, and probably even after the charter was
revoked in 1684, the Freeman might give his
vote for Magistrates in person or proxy at the Court of Elections.
(005) Proxy voting was also
adopted in colonies adjacent to Massachusetts.
(006) Indeed, traces of the
practice of proxy voting remained in Connecticut's election laws until the
final supersedure of her charter in 1819.
(007) In Maryland, the primary
assemblies allowed proxy voting.
(008) After the assembly of 1638, protests were sent to the proprietor in
England.
(009) It was said that the
Governor and his friends were able to exercise too much influence through the
proxies they had obtained.
(010) Proxy voting was also used
in South Carolina; the proprietors in September 1683
complained to the governor about this system.
(011) Proxy voting was used in
Long Island, New York as well, at that time.
(012) Phraseology was sometimes
designed to hide the fact that a proxy system was in use and that the majority
of voters did not actually attend the elections.
(013) In Rhode Island, the system
described as a "proxy" system, from 1664 onward, was actually simply
the sending of written ballots from voters who did not attend the election,
rather than a true proxy system, as in the assembly of 1647.
(014) In Alabama, the Perry County
Civic League's members' assisting illiterate voters by marking a ballot on
their behalf was deemed "proxy voting" and "voting more than
once" and thus held to be illegal.
(015) During the American Civil
War, some northern soldiers used proxy voting.
(016) After Ira Eastman’s
near-victory in New Hampshire, Republicans supported a bill to allow soldiers
to vote by proxy, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court.
(017) In the Progressive Era,
proxy voting was used in Republican Party state conventions in New Hampshire.
(018) The Boston and Maine
Railroad, the Republican Party's ally, maintained control over the Party by
means of these conventions.
(019) "At the 1906 state convention, for instance, party
delegates were quite willing to trade, sell, or exchange their voting power in
return for various forms of remuneration from the party machine.
(020) Public outcry led to the end
of such 'proxy' voting".
(021) Proxy voting was used in some American U.S. Presidential nominating caucuses.
(022) In one case, Eugene
McCarthy’s supporters were in the majority of those present but were outvoted
when the presiding party official cast 492
proxy votes – three times the number present – for his own slate of delegates.
(023) After the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, the New Politics movement charged that Humphrey and party bosses had circumvented the will of Democratic Party members by manipulating the rules to Humphrey's advantage.
(024) In response, the Commission
on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, also known as the McGovern-Fraser
Commission, was created to rework the rules in time for the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
(025) State parties were required
to ban proxy voting in order to have their delegates seated at the national
convention.
(026) It was said that these rules
had been used in "highly selective" ways.
(027) Several attempts have been
made to place proxy voting-related initiatives on the California ballot, but
all have failed.