credit Photo: John Vachon
The American republic rests on the principle of one person and one vote. The voting booth is one of the most inviolable patches of American soil. Not that this ever prevented photographers from sticking their lenses inside polling places across the breadth of this great land, from seething city to bucolic township. As you cast your ballot today, consider those who have voted before you and contemplate the amazing continuum that has led us to this time and place. Left: Farmers of German and Russian stock, all Americans now, wait to vote in the 1940 presidential election at the Beaver Creek precinct in North Dakota’s McIntosh County. North Dakota was one of 10 states to vote for Republican Wendell Willkie. The other 38 went for Franklin D. Roosevelt, carrying him in a landslide to his third term.
Vote early, vote often: Balloting Chicago style, circa 1904, with the man on the right casting his vote on a mechanical voting machine, despite an open curtain. Photo courtesy Chicago Daily News
This voting-machine "apparatus," in a Chicago voting booth, dates from 1904, Teddy Roosevelt’s big year. Photo courtesy Chicago Daily News
credit Photo: John Vachon
On Election Day 1940, in North Dakota’s McIntosh County, farmers cast their ballots at this little schoolhouse on the prairie.
credit Photo: Marion Post
In 1940, a Woodstock, Vermont, selectman casts his ballot on "the liquor question." ("Yes, I’ll have another one.")
credit Photo: Lewis Walker
FDR was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president in 1944. Whether this fellow leaving a voting booth in Barnesville, Maryland, was a New Dealer or cast his ballot for the GOP’s Thomas Dewey is impossible to say. Which is kind of the point, right?
credit Photo: Arthur Rothstein
A black voter hands in his ballot in Dunklin County, Missouri, during a 1942 primary election.
credit Photo: Russell Lee
Mormon farmers, part of a Farm Security Administration cooperative stallion group, meet in 1940 to elect a caretaker for their group. The FSA was formed as a part of FDR’s New Deal to alleviate the effects of rural poverty.
credit Photo: Maria Ealand
This firehouse in Arlington, Virginia, served as a polling place during the 1944 presidential election.
credit Photo: Arthur Rothstein
A voter casts his ballot during a 1937 community election in Greenbelt, Maryland.
credit Photo: Courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
First lady Eleanor Roosevelt votes in Hyde Park, New York. Who did she vote for? She’s not saying.
credit Photo: Benjamin Brown French
All that voting leads to inauguration day, in this case Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural in 1861. Note that the U.S. Capitol is still under construction. You can’t see the war clouds gathering but they’re very present, and getting darker by the minute.
