The new ballot, though certainly an improvement, failed to produce the full results expected of it. The connivance of election officials and corrupt voters often annulled its virtue by devices growing in variety and ingenuity as politicians became acquainted with the reform. Statutes and sometimes constitutions therefore went further, making the count of ballots public, ordering it carried out near the polling place, and allowing municipalities to insure a still more secret vote and an instantaneous, unerring tally by the use of voting machines. In the North and West the tendency of the new fundamental laws was to widen the suffrage, rendering it, for males over twenty-one years of age, practically universal. Woman suffrage, especially on local and educational matters, spread more and more. Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah women voted upon exactly the same terms as men. In Idaho women sat in the legislature. There was much agitation for minority representation. Illinois set an example by the experiment of cumulative voting in the election of lower house members of the legislature. Nearly everywhere at the South constitutional reform involved negro disfranchisement. The blacks were numerous, but their rule meant ruin. It was easy for the whites to keep them in check, as had been done for years, by bribery and threats, supplemented, when necessary, by flogging and the shotgun, But this gave to the rising generation of white men the worst possible sort of a political education. The system was too barbarous to continue. What meaning could free institutions have for young voters who had never in all their lives seen an election carried save by these vicious means! New constitutions which should legally eliminate most of the negro vote were the alternative.