Two weeks after Susan B. Anthony cast her ballot in the 1872 presidential election, an audacious act of defiance and a pivotal moment in the women’s suffrage movement, a deputy federal marshal visited her home in Rochester, N.Y.
Anthony received the federal marshal in her parlor, where he explained that she was to accompany him “downtown,” according to an account of the meeting she later gave to the National Woman Suffrage Association.
“What for?” Anthony recalled asking him.
“To arrest you,” he replied.
Fast-forward 152 years to Saturday, when more than 700 voters visited the same home to cast their ballots for president, after it was designated an early polling site by the local board of elections.
The home, on Madison Street in the city’s aptly named Susan B. Anthony neighborhood, long ago became a museum and a National Historic Landmark. But this year marks its first as a polling place.
“It’s just so cool to be able to vote at the place where Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting,” said Rebecca McGinnis, 37, who held her 1-year-old daughter, Clara, as they stood in line with dozens of voters.
“It’s very full circle,” she added. “I think about my great-grandmother coming here and not being able to vote at all, and now her great-great-granddaughter is standing in the place where Susan B. Anthony fought for women’s rights.”
Early voting in New York runs through Nov. 3. Election Day is Nov. 5.
Deborah L. Hughes, the president and chief executive of the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House, said the organization had come up with the idea of serving as a polling site in 2020, when New York introduced early voting in presidential elections.
“The point wasn’t to celebrate this great icon of Susan B. Anthony,” Ms. Hughes said. “It was about the cause to which she dedicated her whole life and that we believe is still essential and important. This is right in line with our mission.”
The museum faced more than a few setbacks securing its status as a polling place, according to museum and elections officials.
In September 2021, a fire that authorities investigated as “suspicious,” and which was thought to be arson, destroyed the back porch. After it was repaired, space became the biggest hurdle.
The house is a modest two-story brick Italianate home, suitable for middle-class residents of the day. Occupancy is limited to 35 people, and none of its 12 rooms can accommodate more than one voting machine.
As a workaround, the museum proposed using the more spacious carriage house at the back of the property. But it only had one door, and elections officials wanted at least two for safety purposes.
The museum built a second exit for the carriage house with the help of a state grant, but doing so first required approval from the local preservation board. Then the door didn’t arrive on time.
“It was a pretty heavy lift for us,” Ms. Hughes said.
The Monroe County Board of Elections finally designated the museum as a polling site this year, after county elections commissioners from both parties signed off.
“It’s the Susan B. Anthony House,” said Jackie Ortiz, the Democratic commissioner. “How wonderful for them to be participating in this way.”
The museum served early voters in March for the presidential primary election and again for the local primaries held in June. The two elections drew a total of roughly 300 voters to the polling site, according to board of elections records.
But the marquee race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump drew 721 voters on the first day of early voting, according to the elections board.
Parking regulations that ordinarily restrict vehicles to one side of the quiet street where the museum sits were suspended to accommodate traffic. Within an hour, both sides of the street were teeming with cars, and voters were waiting in long lines that snaked around the museum’s tiny parking lot.
One of those voters was Alex Reing, a 20-year-old student at the Rochester Institute of Technology who uses they/them pronouns and came with their parents.
“This is such a historic landmark for women’s rights and equal rights in general,” they said. “It just felt right to place my vote for a woman here.”
While voters on Election Day are limited to casting their ballots at their designated polling sites, state law allows county election boards to give early voters the option to choose their polling site. That was the case in Monroe County, which meant that many voters at the museum had made a special trip from the suburbs.
Jill Meredith Vinci, 46, figured she had passed three polling sites on her way to the museum from her home in the suburb of Brighton. She carried a photo of her recently deceased mother and wore a jean jacket festooned with patches that they had sewn on together. One read “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
“There’s a significance in the symbolism of this place,” Ms. Vinci said. “If you’re going to choose anywhere in the Rochester area to vote, why would you not choose here?”
Of the 17 early voting locations scattered throughout Monroe County, the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House is by far the most distinctive. The rest are the typical town halls, courthouses, recreation centers and the like.
In her day, Anthony cast her revolutionary ballot a few blocks from her home at a general store on Main Street in what was then the city’s 8th Ward. Today, the location is marked by a bronze ballot box on a pedestal outside a coffeehouse.
Anthony and a small group of women cast their ballots after she had persuaded three election inspectors to register the women as legal voters a few days earlier. The inspectors were later indicted and convicted by a jury.
It may be tempting to imagine that an act of defiance with such ramifications would have made the front pages of newspapers of the time. But, in most cases, it did not.
The New York Times covered the moment with a single paragraph on an inside page under the heading “Minor Topics.” The leading local newspaper, The Democrat and Chronicle, made no mention of the event until Anthony was arrested.
Her subsequent trial and conviction, which resulted in a $100 fine that Anthony never paid, have been well documented.
She was pardoned posthumously by Mr. Trump in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote — a gesture rejected by the museum, which argued that the pardon “validated the proceedings” that led to Anthony’s conviction.
Rachel Campbell, 30, said she had traveled from the other side of the city to vote at the museum because casting a ballot there felt like a culmination of Anthony’s work.
“Being from Rochester and being able to vote for the first Black and South Asian woman running for president here just feels so significant,” Ms. Campbell said, adding: “It’s good to do symbolic things to encourage hope, you know?”
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