The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Richard Franklin Bensel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Richard Bensel has written a fascinating book on a timely subject, the nature of polling places in the United States at the juncture between the second and third party systems. His cogent description of how balloting actually took place raises provocative questions about the interpretation of nineteenth-century elections, the development of modern democracy, and the dilemmas inherent in electoral institutions.