In this guest blog, Lydia Buckroyd explores the impact of the 1872 Secret Ballot Act on election violence and in particular on election violence deaths. Contrary to widely held views, the introduction of the Secret Ballot did not eliminate, but merely changed the type and timing of election violence deaths:
In the period between the Great Reform Act and Great War, British elections transformed from public, rowdy, and often violent events to the more private, tranquil occasions that we recognise today. The violent nature of elections during the nineteenth Century is starkly reflected in the number of fatalities. It was routine in the nineteenth Century to see several deaths per election, sometimes several killed in a single event. One of the worst examples of this was the Sheffield election of 1832, when five people were shot by military forces called in to disperse an election riot (Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 1832). But by the turn of the century, only the very occasional fatality was recorded. Why did British electoral conduct change so dramatically?
