Camp 22 member Sebastian Nelson, an archivist for the State of California, recently published an article about the history of absentee ballots. California first enacted absentee ballots to accommodate soldiers serving far away from their home districts during the Civil War. The article appears in the Spring 2013 issue of “California Originals”, the newsletter of the California State Archives. From the article:
Several hundred members of the famed California Battalion (fighting east of the Mississippi as part of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry) gathered on September 2, 1863, to cast their ballots at their post in Virginia. According to Sergeant Charles Roberts, “all seemed well pleased to have a chance to vote for our state officers.”