Pass the Cookies and the Ballots

Forty years ago, I voted in my first presidential election in Waterford. On the lawn of an old brick house was a small stick sign that read "Polling Place." There were no signs touting candidates; no one handed out sample ballots.

Inside, the air was scented with slow-burning logs in the fireplace. There were homemade cookies and grapes to be nibbled, cider to drink and apples to take.

Behind a side table sat Clare Metzger and a helper. It was Metzger's house. She greeted each voter she knew well by first name and by mister, missis or miss and a surname if she did not. Having been there but three years, I fell into the mister category. The helper then checked you off on the register of voters and handed you the paper ballot. No one asked for identification. There were no "I voted" stickers to give out.

Other than some people who had already voted and were chatting and nibbling, the parlor was empty. No poker-faced party faithful checked off who had voted.

On the table you could see the prominent locked wooden box that held the penciled-in ballots. You marked yours on the dining table in the next room and gave your folded ballot to Metzger's helper. She dropped it in the slot.

Sooner or later, an old-timer was bound to tell you that the box you had dropped your ballot into was the same box that Waterford precinct voters had used when they voted in May 1861 to remain in the Union during the Civil War. (Although the Waterford vote was 220 to 31, the county voted 1,626 to 726 to secede.)

The privacy in Metzger's dining room, such as it was, satisfied rural Virginia requirements of the secret ballot for president, adopted by the state in 1874. Before that, it was commonplace to ask a prominent person whom he had voted for. If he didn't care to say, the registrar could look up the ballot and share the voter's preferences with all who cared to hear.

A Virginia woman did not face such inquiries because women weren't allowed to vote until the 1920 presidential election. Carrie Emerick, a Purcellville suffragist and member of the National Women's Party, was the first woman in Loudoun County to pay a poll tax to vote that year.

Virginia, like many Southern states, authorized a poll tax of $1.50 in 1902 to disenfranchise black voters, many of whom could not afford it -- really three times that amount, because the tax had to be paid for three years unless the voter had just turned 21. It took nearly a week to make $4.50.

Because I knew that in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed the poll tax in national elections, I would brazenly cross out the poll tax line on the yearly Loudoun tax bill and add: "This fee is illegal." Yet, until 1970, when the Virginia Constitution was amended to remove the poll tax in all elections, the fee legally remained on county tax bills. But one couldn't be prosecuted for nonpayment.

A few years later, I realized how mean-spirited I had been. Few yearly tax bills exceeded $200, and the extra $1.50 now seems like a small donation.

"Two hundred dollars was a lot of money to most of us farm families," Jane Wortman said after I told her that story.