History
The right of political parties to have observers at polling places is old. One of the established roles for such observers is to act as challengers, in the event that someone attempts to vote at the polling place who is not eligible to vote.
When a voter's right to vote was challenged, state laws typically allowed them to cast a challenged ballot. After the polls closed, the canvassing board was then charged with examining the challenged ballots and determining whether the challenge was to be upheld or not.
The right to a provisional ballot, as enacted by the Help America Vote Act, brings a degree of uniformity to the array of various challenged ballot rules enacted by various states.
Read more about this topic: Provisional Ballot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)