Party bosses worked this scheme throughout the 19th century: rounding up drifters and drunkards, registering them at flophouses in swing districts and herding them to the polls on Election Day. Cunning politicos realized that by relocating just a few thousand voters, they could sway races, elect presidents, shape a nation of millions. Americans called it colonization — a fitting name in an era when political machines settled empires not overseas but in Manhattan or Sheboygan, Wisc.
Then, after a lifetime of toleration, Americans significantly reformed voting in the early 20th century, closing the loopholes that allowed colonization to succeed. What had seemed like a permanent flaw in our democracy was killed so decisively that it sounds made up today. Perhaps there’s a lesson here, as many look beyond the 2026 midterms and see a future of endless electoral shenanigans.
one thing is familiar from the 19th century: the dread that our democracy is becoming so permanently gamed that it leaves voters no role. Just as we worry about this “gerrymandering doom loop” today, deep in the Gilded Age the dour editor E.L. Godkin warned that there was “little prospect of escape” from America’s political “doom.” And where contemporary Americans feel a generalized hopelessness about reform, the British scholar James Bryce pointed to a “fatalism of the multitude” corroding Americans in the 1880s, certain that their democracy was beyond fixing.
And yet that doomed American electorate managed to rally against, reform and kill off a cartoonishly undemocratic practice. It would be facile to suggest that we could borrow their specific tricks today; but history tells us that it can be done, that it has been done.
