Richard Carwardine

Where you allow someone that you designate to cast your vote for you in your home precinct.

And the envelope marks soldiers' vote could easily be opened and a different ballot be submitted inside.

Both sides claim malpractice and fraud.

You have Democrats claiming that the War Department is delaying the delivery of soldiers' votes back home, that where they're known to be McClellan votes, they are being held up by the War Department.

even claims that the ballots are being extensively altered by removing McClellan's votes from the envelopes and substituting Lincoln ballots, weighting the scales very powerfully in favor of the Republicans and the administration.

But the Republicans, too, could point legitimately to the arrest of several Democrats in Washington and Baltimore for forging McClellan ballots designed to swing the vote in New York State.

So both parties are at it.

But it's the Republicans who are able to present themselves most powerfully and most convincingly to the army that they are the friends of the democratic rights of the soldiers.

The day itself passed off peacefully enough, but there is this strong sense of tension, a sense of high excitement, determination to be heard on the day, to stand up for your rights as voters, regardless of what your commanding officers might want or regardless of what the other party's campaigners might want.

Yes, there's fraud.

Yes, there's manipulation.

Yes, there's partisanship.

There's malpractice.

But I think ultimately there was enough of authenticity and good practice in the absentee balloting in the war for the result itself not to have been a distortion.

I mean, he knew that the electoral process in wartime had its shortcomings, but what it showed was just how deeply embedded the idea of representative government had become in the United States over the years since the revolution.