![]() ![]() ![]() "No law has been devised in any State in which the suffrage has been given to citizens in military service that did not leave room for the grossest of frauds," warned The Nation magazine in 1866. And some lawmakers and advocates want to use the rules that lets that Marine cast a ballot as a model for how all Americans could vote in the November presidential election if the pandemic continues. It's now easier in some ways for a Marine in Afghanistan to vote than it is for an American stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. They warned of rampant fraud and "a scheme" by Republicans "to gain some great advantage to their party," as one Wisconsin state senator put it before the legislature voted on party lines to become the first state to legalize absentee voting.Ībout 150,000 of the 1 million Union soldiers were able to vote absentee in the 1864 presidential election in what became the first widespread use of non-in-person voting in American history.Ī century and a half later, amidst a new debate over voting by mail as the country prepares to hold an election during a different kind of war - this one against the coronavirus - America's long history of letting soldiers vote from far-flung war zones shows the issue has always been controversial, but that the worst fears of critics have never come to pass. It was the 1860s, the Civil War was raging and Republicans, led by President Abraham Lincoln, wanted to let Union soldiers vote from the battlefield. ![]()
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