Corrupt Practices
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
methods employed in elections to influence the voter or to change the result of the election in an improper manner. The practices alluded to are bribery, making false election returns, making false declaration regarding election expenses, and personation of voters. The English Parliament led the way in putting a stop to these abuses of democratic elections. As early as 1854 it had passed a law against bribery at election, entitled the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act. In 1883 Parliament passed what is probably, even to-day, the most effective and sweeping Corrupt Practices Act. Its main provisions are that it inflicts severe penalties, imprisonment and fine, upon those who practice bribery or "undue influence" upon voters. So broadly has this last phrase been interpreted that an English court has held an entertainment given with the intention of corrupting voters to be a violation of the law. The law further provides for the restriction within very narrow limits of the number of persons paid by campaign committees for their work in the elections; it prescribes a fixed scale of lawful expenditures by candidates or committees, and requires a full and correct account of all expenditures. The United States was slow in following Great Brit ain in this respect. The opening of the 20th century saw a change for the betand, by 1920, State had placed upon its statute book a Corrupt Practices Act. Hardly any of them are as sweeping in their provisions as the English act, but all require the publication of campaign expenses and set penalties for false returns. See ELEC- TORAL REFORM.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 that Britain's 1883 Corrupt Practices Act was "probably, even to-day, the most effective and sweeping" law of its kind, and that every American state had by 1920 adopted a weaker imitation. Britain's approach has survived and grown: the rules were consolidated in the Representation of the People Act 1983, and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 added national spending caps and created the Electoral Commission to police them. The United States went the other way. Congress passed its own Federal Corrupt Practices Act in 1925 and, after Watergate, created the Federal Election Commission in 1975, but the Supreme Court held in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) that limits on campaign spending violate the First Amendment, and Citizens United (2010) opened the way to unlimited independent spending by corporations and unions "a regime of disclosure without ceilings that Collier's readers would not recognise.
Written for this edition, 2026.