It’s one of those things you just don’t think much about. Quite literally, just another piece of furniture.
Perhaps, when you cast your ballot in Mason, you might notice one of the boxes is significantly more weathered than the other. Or you might catch sight of the small metal tag on the front and the town’s name printed in big block letters beneath.
It’s an innocuous little box, but it’s seen over 100 years worth of town history — created to help eliminate voter fraud and intimidation and making the concept of the secret ballot a staple of the country’s democracy.
In the 1800s, voting was a very different affair than it is today. Initially, it was usually done by voice vote — and usually in more informal settings than in something like Town Meeting. More like the county fair.
In order to get more accurate counts and decrease voter fraud, that system eventually moved to ballots, where voters would write their name under the candidate they supported. Not entirely secret, even if they were dropping their vote into a box.
But politics grew more and more divisive, and the number of people voting grew, and it soon became more reasonable — and more desired — to have secret ballots. And in 1891, the Secretary of State’s office took steps to ensure that each town in New Hampshire had the tools to do that — namely, a ballot box, and paper ballots.
That year, the legislature passed a law, requiring the secretary of state to provide “every city and town with a ballot box for use at each polling place.”
They were to be outfitted with “sufficient locks,” a bell and mechanical devices for receiving, registering and canceling every ballot deposited therein.
The town clerks took custody of the boxes, and the law stated that if they were lost, stolen, or irreparably damaged, the towns were responsible for replacing them themselves. After shelling out a whole $595 — around $15,000 by today’s standards – to distribute 272 boxes to each municipality, towns were on their own after that. But they might not have forseen just how long towns could make them last. Antrim, Bennington, Dublin, Greenfield, Temple and Wilton all still have their boxes – and Dublin, Bennington and Temple have used them continuously in every election since they received them (the rest have been retired for display or to historical collections).