How's this for unusual election stories?
From Male, Female or Both? Reactions to Intersex Americans Through History
In the early to mid-19th century, doctors began to record and discuss encounters with intersex people in medical journals. One of these people was Levi Suydam, a 23-year-old white man and property owner in Connecticut who tried to register to vote in 1843. When someone challenged Suydam’s application on the grounds that he was more female than male and therefore couldn’t vote, a doctor from Hartford named William James Barry stepped in to examine him.
Based on the presence of some male sex organs, Barry decided Suydam was “a male citizen, and consequently entitled to all the privileges of a freeman,” as he wrote in The New York Journal of Medicine. That spring, Suydam was able to cast the deciding vote for the Whig party in a local election. Yet afterwards, Barry wondered whether he’d been wrong. He and another doctor found out Suydam menstruated and lacked facial hair. They also realized Suydam was sexually attracted to men, a characteristic the doctors considered inherently female.
Barry didn’t record how his follow-up examinations affected Suydam, so we don’t know if he ended up losing his right to vote.