Representative, responsible, efficient government is our goal; and the way to it lies not through additional and more complicated political machinery, but through such a simplification of our present machinery as will permit the electorate to bring steady and persistent pressure on the great organs of government in the broad daylight of interested public discussion.1

President Wilson put the situation relative to the long ballot in these terse phrases:

Elaborate your government; place every officer upon his own dear little statute; make it necessary for him to be voted for; and you will not have a democratic government. Just so certainly as you segregate all these little offices and put every man upon his own statutory pedestal and have a miscellaneous organ of government, too miscellaneous for a busy people either to put together or to watch, public aversion will have no effect on it; and public opinion, finding itself ineffectual, will get discouraged, as it does in this country by finding its assaults like assaults against battlements of air, where they find no one to resist them, where they capture no positions, where they accomplish nothing. You have a grand housecleaning, you have a grand overturning, and the next morning you find the government going on just as it did before you did the overturning. What is the moral? . . . The remedy is contained in one word: simplification. Simplify your processes, and you will begin to control; complicate them, and you will get farther and farther away from their control. Simplification! simplification! simplification! is the task that awaits us; to reduce the number of persons to be voted for to the absolute workable minimum-knowing whom you have selected; knowing whom you have trusted; and having so few persons to watch that you can watch them.2

As a result of the long ballot and blind voting, large power is intrusted to organizations of political specialists. This condition, the leaders of the short-ballot movement contend, is not due to the peculiar civic indifference of the American people, but rests on the fact that our form of democracy is unworkable because

First, it submits to popular election offices which are too unimportant to attract public attention.

Second, it submits to popular election so many offices.

1 C. A. Beard, op. cit., p. 483.

2 From "Civic Problems," an address delivered March 9, 1909, before the Civic League of St. Louis. Quoted in C. A. Beard, op. cit., p. 483.

at one time as to make the business of ticket making too intricate for popular participation hence some sort of private political machine becomes an indispensable element in electoral action.

Consequently many are elected to public office without adequate public scrutiny, and owe their selection not to the voters, but to the makers of the party ticket, who thus acquire an influence that is capable of great abuse.1

The long ballot, with its various lists of trivial offices, is to be found nowhere but in the United States. The English ballot never covers more than three offices, usually only one. In Canada, the ballot is less commonly limited to a single office, but the number is never large. To any Englishman or Canadian, our long ballot is astonishing and our blind voting appalling. A Swiss would have to live four hundred years to vote upon as many men as an American undertakes to elect in one day. The politicians as a professional class, separate from popular leaders or officeholders, are unknown in other lands, and the very word "politician" has a special meaning in this country which foreigners do not attach to it. Government manipulated behind the scenes by politicians, in endless opposition to government by public opinion, is the "unique American phenomenon in the long ballot's train of consequences. The Short Ballot.-The short ballot plan is a non-partisan movement, the significance of which may be indicated by a few representative opinions.3

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I have the fullest sympathy with every reform in governmental and election machinery which shall facilitate the expression of the popular will, such as the Short Ballot and the reduction in elective offices. -WILLIAM H. TAFT, speech of acceptance, 1912.

Taken from The Short Ballot-A Movement to Simplify Politics (1920). The National Short Ballot Organization, New York City.

2 Short Ballot Principles, by R. S. Childs, (Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1914).

Reprinted in Foreword to The Short Ballot in Illinois, published by the City Club of Chicago in 1912 and in The Short Ballot; A Movement to Simplify Politics, 1920 issued by the Short Ballot Organization.

In the first place I believe in the short ballot. You cannot get good service from the public servant if you cannot see him, and there is no more effective way of hiding him than by mixing him up with a multitude of others so that there are none of them important enough to catch the eye of the average workaday citizen.-THEodore Roosevelt before Ohio Constitutional Convention.

I believe the short ballot is the key to the whole problem of the restoration of popular government in this country.-WOODROW WILSON. There should be a reduction in the number of elective offices. The ends of democracy will be better attained to the extent that the attention of the voters may be focused upon comparatively few offices, the incumbents of which can be held strictly accountable for administration. -CHARLES E. HUGHES.

The short ballot-as if that were not absolutely the gist of all constructive reform. The short ballot-few candidates to be voted for; so few that the voters can really inform themselves about the merits and demerits of the candidates-now there is the only way to get rid of the bosses and the machines.-CHARLES W. ELIOT.

The term "short ballot" has come into use during the last ten years in connection with the movement to reduce the number of elective offices. It contemplates the election of those officers only who are to determine policies and the appointment of those who are to act in a purely administrative capacity.

It is a device intended to do away with our blanket ballot and to concentrate the attention of the voter upon a few important positions on which he can make a relatively intelligent decision as to candidates. A prominent advocate of the short ballot sums up the faults to be remedied by the short ballot. We find, he says, that there are three practical methods of concealing public servants from their masters, the people, and thus causing popular control to relax:

(a) By having so many elections simultaneously that each individual candidate is lost in the confusion.

(b) By dividing power among so many petty officers that each one of them escapes scrutiny by reason of insignificance.

(c) By making an office undebatable in character, so that discussion regarding it is dull and unlikely to attract attention.1

R. S. Childs, Short Ballot Principles, p. 50.

To remedy such conditions as now prevail, which result in blind voting and unintelligent action by voters, the following are regarded indispensable:

1. To shorten the ballot to a point where the average man will vote intelligently without giving more attention to politics than he does at present.

2. To limit the elective offices to those which are naturally conspicuous.

Short-ballot principles as applied to a state would, it is thought, result in the election of but few state officers, such as the Governor and one or more financial officers, and the appointment of the heads of the state executive departments, boards, bureaus, and commissions. The members of Congress and of the state legislatures would also be elected, but by a district system each voter would be called upon to make but one choice. In counties, the members of the county board, and in cities the members of the city council, are, it is believed, the only positions which should be filled by popular election.1

The short - ballot plan involves the extension of the appointive power for the higher positions and the adoption of the merit system for the selection of all but a few of the executive officers, who may be regarded, with the Governor, as responsible for the general policies of the administration.

There are no "short-ballot" states, though several have taken important steps in the direction of shortening their ballots. In California, the members of the railroad commission, the state printer, and the clerk of the supreme court have been removed from the ballot, and Ohio has taken from the elective list the public works commissioner, the superintendent of public instruction, and the dairy and food commissioner. "The nearest approach to a 'short ballot' state is now New Jersey, where but a single executive officer is elected. " A long step forward was

1

1 Cf. The Short Ballot in Illinois, report of the Short Ballot Committee of the City Club of Chicago and The Short Ballot Applied to the State of New York, reprinted by the National Short Ballot Organization.

2 Bulletins for the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, 1917-18, vol. i, no. 10, p. 397.

taken in the enactment of the Civil Administrative Code of Illinois, which is planned on the short-ballot basis, making the Governor the executive head of the state, with the right to appoint Cabinet heads. It is anticipated that the constitutional convention soon to convene will make Illinois a real short-ballot state.1

A recent amendment has shortened the ballot of Pennsylvania. Hereafter, each elector will mark his ballot only for Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and two other state officers; for a representative in Congress, a state senator, and a representative in the general assembly from his own district. If administrative consolidation as outlined in the many state commissions and committees is adopted, the present ballots will be materially shortened. The short ballot movement has gained greatest headway in the cities where commission government has reduced the number of elective officers to a board of approximately three to seven members, who become responsible for the entire management of city affairs. In the Federal government the short ballot now prevails, for the voter selects a President who becomes responsible for the Cabinet and through his advisers for all of the subordinate officers in the Federal administrative service. It remains for the states to change their administrative organization so that the generally accepted principles of the short ballot may be incorporated.

Among the recent efforts to improve political methods is the introduction of the nonpartisan ballot on which all party designations have been eliminated and the candidates arranged alphabetically in groups under each office. Nonpartisan ballots have been adopted particularly in cities with commission government and in the election of judges. In a few cases the nonpartisan feature has been applied to the nominations and elections for state officers. Though the removal of party designations makes it more difficult

1 For proposed amendments and legislative acts to introduce the short ballot in a state cf. "The Short Ballot Applied to the State of New York," issued by the National Short Ballot Organization.