Election Day

Book excerpt: "Election Day" has an interesting and complex heritage that combines the history of our voting practices and suffrage laws with the very wonderful story of how Americans have celebrated the day. Peppered with lively anecdotes and rich with the results of extensive research, "Election Day" makes entertaining reading for the armchair reader and will be a much consulted sourcebook for American history buffs and historians. The book intertwines presidential campaign history with a social and cultural history of the day as it depicts election changes throughout the past 250 years. There are entertaining anecdotes of: How voters throughout the years have voted early and often. How soldiers first got the right to vote from the battlefield. How Times Square in its heyday prepared for election eve. The role of the electronic media in modern election days. As the first popular history of our democratic process, "Election Day" takes the reader from oral voting during the colonial period right through to the present day use of optically scanned ballots. Readers accustomed to thinking of our autumn elections as orderly, well-supervised events will discover that boisterousness, fraudulence, hard drinking, and rioting have often marked the holiday in the past.