23. The implementation of the secret ballot, known as the Australian ballot.
During the election of 1888, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts used, for the first time, a method of voting known as the Australian ballot (the Jim Crow city of Louisville, Kentucky used it too). After his defeat, Grover Cleveland studied the use of the ballot and in 1889 he began to argue for its adoption throughout the United States, as a means of preventing debacles such as had occurred in 1876 and 1888. By the end of that year nine states, including Indiana, adopted the Australian ballot as the means of casting votes in their jurisdictions. Cleveland continued to build support for the nationwide use of the secret ballot.
In 1892 Cleveland ran for president a third time, and carried 23 states to Harrison’s 16 (a third candidate carried five states). Of the 44 states which made up the Union at the time, 39 used the Australian ballot Cleveland and others convinced the American electoral system needed reforming had pushed for. Among the states which used the secret ballot carried by Cleveland was Indiana, stolen from him four years earlier. Part of the reason for Cleveland’s win, however, was the solidly Democratic Jim Crow South, where so many likely Republican votes were suppressed by the laws designed to keep blacks from voting.