WORCESTER - If you're whining about the incessant voting these days, consider what it was like around here in the early years of this country.
Folks voted from spring to fall. Town elections in Massachusetts were held in March. In April came the contests for governor, lieutenant governor, and the state Senate; in May, elections for state representatives. On even-numbered years, people voted for Congressional delegates and the presidency, usually in November. Among the various states, elections of some stripe were held every month but June between March and November.
People in Rhode Island and Connecticut voted twice every year for the lower house in their state legislatures. Turnouts were robust. In 1812, over 100,000 Bay State residents voted for governor - an impressive stat given that only adult white males could vote.
I know this because I talked to Philip Lampi, who has made it his personal mission for 47 years to find and collate all of our country's election returns between 1787 and 1825 for federal, state, county, and local contests.
Return with me to 1960, when Lampi was 16. While doing his homework, he stumbled on election returns that he traced back to 1824. But he could find nothing about presidential election returns before 1824. And so it began.
For decades, Lampi, now 63, was on his own - a solitary figure who would materialize at courthouses, city halls, universities, and historical societies across the South and other spots in America. He used vacations from small jobs to pay for his pursuits. He'd travel on a shoestring, avoiding cities because their hotels were expensive. He stayed in a dorm while doing research at Ohio State University.
He found huge gaps in election results, particularly in the South, perhaps because of the Civil War, exacerbated by humidity and heat. "Massachusetts was one of the few states that had any official elections records for governor and Congress," says Lampi, a small man with a soft voice.
His work is groundbreaking, and he drew the interest of a few historians from the opening bell because no one else was doing what he was doing, and what he was doing was very valuable. With his findings, people will be able to track on a yearly basis the political mood of the country. One of his early champions was the celebrated historian David Hackett Fischer.
Lampi's passion now has a name - "A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787 - 1825." It is a big project with grant money from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tufts is digitizing all of his data, which stretches over endless loose-leaf binders.
The current NEH grant - there have been others - actually went to the American Antiquarian Society, where he works, in Worcester. Lampi never went to college and needed the aegis and prestige of the AAS to get the money. But make no mistake, the grant was all about Lampi.
(The AAS claims to have a more comprehensive collection of American imprints until 1876 than the Library of Congress, including a larger collection of newspapers. Founded in 1812, the place is a national resource.)
His life is at least as compelling as his work. Lampi was dealt a bad hand at birth. He was sent off to foster homes almost immediately. "I was in foster care my whole life," he says, "Fitchburg, Leominster, Groton."
"My mother didn't have the means to take care of me," he says. "She had no money. There was no place for me to stay." He also lived for a while at the Stetson Home, the Barre facility that was a de facto orphanage for boys from dysfunctional homes. (Today, the Stetson School focuses exclusively on juvenile males with sexual behavior problems.)
His mother was divorced when she had Philip. It was during World War II, and she worked in a factory. Later, she labored as a waitress at night. He never met his father, and Lampi didn't see much of her until his high school years, when he would visit her during school breaks.
After high school, he moved briefly with a friend to Florida and worked in St. Petersburg for an outfit that made artificial fruit. During his time there, Lampi would drive up on weekends to the University of Florida in Jacksonville to pour through its records. He would sleep in his car on Friday and Saturday nights to save money.
Lampi returned to the North and took small jobs to fund his passion. For 12 years, he worked as a night watchman at Stetson. He would bring his microfilm machine and typewriter with him, and work when he had some time in the stillness.
In 1973, Lampi was awarded one of the first AAS fellowships to further his research. He then continued as a part-time consultant until he was hired full time in the AAS newspaper department.
When he started the project, microfilm machines were tough to come by and copy machines unheard of. So for years, he painstakingly transcribed the data on paper in beautiful script. (I would be in four-point restraints after a day of that, but Lampi treasures the process.)
His project is slated to end in 2009, but Philip Lampi will keep going. I ask him how long he intends to pursue the election returns.
He says, "Until I die."
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
