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If one reasons that since it took so long for the secret ballot to invented, it is thus not that of an important part of democracy, same could be said of women voting. That was enacted even later, so it is even less crucial.
I agree that women voting is not an essential part of democracy, though I support women's suffrage.
I'm partial to the empirical arguments from Garrett Jones' "10% Less Democracy", which argues that if you look at indexes of democracy and compare them to a variety of measures of well-being, it is not the case that the most democratic countries have the best outcomes. There's some floor of democratic-ness above which outcomes tend to rise, and some ceiling above which outcomes become bad again.
I think fiddling with secret ballots probably isn't worth it, as long as you're empirically above the floor of democratic-ness with all of the other policies you adopt.
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Also, machine politics was the norm for most of that era in any city big enough to be worth looting. The secret ballot helped make maintaining the machine more difficult.
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