Voter registration begins
One hundred years ago today … New York’s voter registration week started.
The Evening World, 4 October 1920, p.4. Chronicling America.
Voters had less than one week to travel to a registration office and fill out a voter registration form. One 68-year-old immigrant from Austria, Meier (or Meyer) Meisels, who lived alone 40 Windsor Place, Brooklyn–a Republican, self-employed at 535 6th Avenue–apparently did so.
Allen, Jan Meisels. “Voter Registration Records.” The Jewish Genealogy Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County.
Brooklyn’s Standard Union had, the previous week, printed an essay by Tom W. Jackson urging people to register, and informing them of the process. It was apparently aimed at newly eligible or first-time registrants. Alongside its appeal to citizenship, it includes what seem to be half-serious jokes about the pens at the bureau and getting evicted or beaten for voting against the bosses’ and landlords’ interests.
The Standard Union, 29 September 1920, p.10. Chronicling America.
Jackson also urged men to take their “wife and daughters along” to the registration office.
For women not blessed with such chivalrous assitance, the League of Women Voters was offering free consultations in the registration and voting process.
The Daily News, 5 October 1920, p.1. Chronicling America.
New York women had won the right to vote in state elections in 1917, but of course 1920 was the first presidential election that women voters could participate in. (See our post about the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18.)
It seems that the first day of registration was slow. The Herald printed the Manhattan and Bronx numbers compared with the previous year, when, as it noted, the “impetus of a presidential election was lacking.”
The New York Herald, 5 October 1920, p.28. Chronicling America.
The clips above are all representative of the NYC papers, which generally featured prominent announcements about the voter registration schedule, though not about the actual sites, oddly enough. Of course, there is evidence that historically, the system of voter registration has been designed to suppress turnout of all but ruling-class voters.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 4, 2020.
TAGS: voting, election, voter registration, suffrage, franchise, Windsor Terrace