Comment on Bensel: “But the Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Doesn't It?”

Extract

“The American Ballot Box” is a most interesting exploration into the deep past of American electoral politics. Well-researched and argued, it provides examples of sometimes very funny interview sessions with nineteenth-century American voters. The basic data method here rests upon using congressional-election contest hearings as sources of information. The author does well, however, to remind us that by definition, election contests may have reflected “the dark side of the force,” so to speak, but also necessarily raised claims of fraud and other abuse by the losers. Naturally, the overwhelming majority of U.S. House elections in the nineteenth century were not contested. The strength of the method lies in the fact of contest itself, which permitted relatively searching inquiry into the conduct of elections, and thus revealed much about their organizational pattern that would be taken for granted (and hence not discussed or brought to light otherwise). But bias may be implicit in the method.