Word: ballot
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...even rail connection with Moscow, went ahead with feverish activity. It was belatedly announced that 94,138,000 Russians registered to vote and that at least 96.5% had voted. All votes counted for the Stalin regime, since only Stalinist candidates ran, and Soviet officials boasted that not a single ballot had come to light which seemed to have been scratched. On the contrary, millions of ballot envelopes when opened were found to contain not only the voter's name signed or printed but also such expressions as "I would give my life for Stalin, let alone my vote!" Also...
...Instantly the solemnity is broken. Everybody in the room jumps up and applauds joyously and stormily for the first ballot of the first general secret election under the Stalinist Constitution-a ballot with the name of the Constitution's creator...
...merely little men to vote for bigger men, but to choose directly their own representatives to the new Russian 1,143-member parliament, the Verkovnyi Soviet or Supreme Council; to vote not in public by a show of hands, but in private in a red-curtained booth, by secret ballot according to their own convictions...
...final and more effective way of getting out the vote the state press made an astonishing last-minute somersault. Soviet editors have been telling Russians for months about how the secret ballot, "that great boon conferred by Stalin, Our Sun," will protect them. The 100,000,000 prospective voters have been warned that of course they must not write their names on these secret ballots, that any ballot would be invalidated if so signed or marked that the voter revealed his identity. Suddenly upon this point the Soviet press reversed, proclaimed last week under banner headlines that every voter...
...handbill urging his election which said: "Our people are confident of their fate and their country because they now have experienced and tested their police and detective forces!" The voters also did their best, in Stalin's district they wrote slogans like HURRAH FOR COMRADE STALIN! on their ballot envelopes, and elsewhere only a few such extremists as those in Uzbekistan went so far as to murder their wives or strip them naked in order to save them from contamination in the new rite of universal suffrage...