After 130 years of trial and change, nearly all of the States vote on the same day, choose representatives in Congress and Presidential electors, as well as most other officers in the same manner, and do not differ very widely in methods of voting. The qualifications of Electors are somewhat diverse, though probably less so than at the beginning, and everywhere the right of suffrage has been widely extended. The period of active assimilation to common standards lasted to the time of the Civil War. Then the universal, extended and heated discussion of human rights, the fury of partisanship, the passions engendered in the great internecine conflict, the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and following all this, the expansion of the nation in wealth and power, together with the accumulation of colossal fortunes, and the growth of corporate importance and influence, all these led to the trial and testing of the most fundamental and long-established rights of man, while every new measure in law, has had to run the gantlet from the preliminary proposal in caucus, convention, primary, or elsewhere, to the final decision thereon in the highest judicial tribunal. There was no final judicial inquiry into the right of suffrage until in 1857 in New York and in 1859 in North Carolina; but such became numerous in the reconstruction period. From questioning new rights of black men, it was a short step to attacking old rights of white men. How the matter of popular elections has grown in importance may in a degree be illustrated by the court decisions. The syllabi up to September 1, 1896, in all State and Federal cases affecting elections, occupy 553 columns of a digest; for the eight and one-half years immediately following, up to April 1, 1905, 396 columns are so filled. Seemingly nearly four-fifths as many points relative to the elective franchise have been passed on in less than a decade, as in the earlier 120 years of free government. Except in the instance of Kentucky, 1889, on the Australian ballot for the city of Louisville, no question reached a court of last resort prior to 1890 on such matters as the Australian ballot, factional nominations, and nomination papers, while in that year four such cases were decided in the New York Court of Appeals alone, and others in Montana and Missouri.