In 1964 Harold Wilson was so afraid that a scheduled election-night broadcast of Steptoe & Son would cost him at least a dozen marginal seats that he successfully pressured the director-general of the BBC to postpone it. There are plenty of ways to manipulate an election, short of stuffing a ballot box.
Another example is here, from 1938:
This ballot paper crudely follows the advice of Dr Josef Goebbels, that ‘the most effective form of persuasion is when you are not aware you are being persuaded’. Translated, it reads: ‘Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the party of our leader, Adolf Hitler? Yes. No.’
It does several things no ballot should be allowed to do — it conflates two separate questions, uses mention of the Anschluss to ‘prime’ voters by referencing Hitler’s recent ‘triumph’ and arranges the tick boxes to create a default answer.
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