A man examining a punch-card ballot in the 2000 U. S. presidential election in Florida
5 November 2020
The verb to canvass and the noun canvas come from the same root; they are simply spelling variations. But how does a type of stiff, coarse fabric morph into a verb meaning to tally votes? It’s a long and tortured history, that involves torture—of a sort—sifting and segregating, marijuana, and post-election chicanery.
Canvas comes into English from the Anglo-Norman canevas and eventually the Latin cannabis, the material having been originally made from hemp. Modern canvas, in contrast, is usually made from cotton or linen and polyvinyl chloride.
The word is recorded as being in existence in 1260 C.E., but the surviving record is a modern transcript. We also have it in various accounts and ledgers from thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England that were written in Latin. But one of the earliest surviving uses in English is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canon Yeoman’s Tale:
The mullok on an heep ysweped was,
And on the floor ycast a canevas,
And al this mullok in a syve ythrowe,
And sifted, and ypiked many a throwe.(The debris was swept into a heap,
And on the floor was cast a canvas,
And all this debris was thrown into a sieve,
And sifted and picked through many times.)
Exactly what process is being described here is uncertain. The canvas cloth could simply be a means of collecting and transporting the debris, or it could be part of the sifting mechanism, for canvas was used for that purpose. In any case, the fact that canvas is associated with sifting and segregating from very early in the word’s history is significant for the development of the later senses.
By the early sixteenth century, canvas was being used as a verb meaning to toss a person about on a canvas sheet, either as a game or for punishment. We know this because it survives in a ledger that indicates a boy was paid eight pence for being so tossed about for the amusement of the Duke of Buckingham on 22 May 1508:
to a child of the kitchen, being “kanwased” before my Lord, 8.d.
Over the coming decades the verb to canvas would generalize and come to mean to be buffeted or knocked about. It also begins to acquire the second < s >. Eventually the noun would come to be spelled with one < s > and the verb with two, but it would take some centuries for this to become the standard practice.
But the verb also came to mean to scrutinize or investigate something or some matter. This sense is a form of metaphorical sifting, examining a matter to separate the good parts from the bad. It appears in a rather ambiguous entry in John Palsgrave’s 1530 English–French dictionary:
kanuas a dogge or a mater / Ie trafficque.prime.coniu. This mater hath be ca[n]uassed in dede: De fait on a trafficque cest affaire de mesmes.
Palsgrave gives the French equivalent of to canvass as trafiquer, a verb of the first conjugation, and gives two distinct senses for the verb. The first sense is to engage in a sale of something, such as one might buy or sell a dog, like the English to traffic in some good. But there is little other evidence of this ever being a sense of the English verb to canvass. The second sense is to engage in a matter or subject, and here Palsgrave becomes more ambiguous. The French verb carries with it a sense of illicit or illegitimate trade, and in French to traffic in a matter is to tamper with it. Whether Palsgrave is simply making mistakes here about the meaning of the French verb or if he is capturing a particular, and probably ephemeral, sense of the English word I cannot tell.
But we get an unambiguous use of to canvass meaning to thoroughly investigate or debate a matter a few decades later. From a 21 March 1573 letter from writer Gabriel Harvey to John Young, the master of Pembroke College, Cambridge:
Sutch matters have bene thurrouly canvissid long ago: and everi on that can do ani thing is able to write hole volumes of them, and make glorius shows with them.
The verb entered politics in the next century, with a sense of soliciting support for a candidate or issue. This sense is still used today, as political parties send out volunteers to canvass neighborhoods for likely voters and ensure they get to the polls on the appointed day. Again, this sense probably developed out of the association with sifting; one sifts the electorate to find those on one’s side. This sense of the verb appears in a 1674 collection of the sayings of Francis Bacon. The man didn’t use the word himself, but his later editors did:
Queen Elizabeth being to resolve upon a great Officer, and being by some, that canvased for others, put in some doubt of that person, whom she meant to advance, called for Mr. Bacon; And told him, she was like one, with a Lanthorn, seeking a man; and seemed unsatisfied in the choice she had of a man for that place.
And in the eighteenth century a second political sense developed, one that applies after votes have been cast. This canvass refers scrutinizing of ballots for irregularities and separating out those that are fraudulent and tallying the legitimate ones. It appears in a 1724 book of English history by Gilbert Burnet in reference to an incident during an election of the mayor of London in 1682, during the reign of Charles II. While the incident occurred nearly 350 years ago, the basic outline sounds eerily familiar with something that could happen today:
When Michaelmas day came, those who found how much they had been deceived in Moor resolved to choose a Mayor that might be depended on. The poll was closed when the Court thought they had the majority: But upon casting it up it appeared they had lost it: So they fell to canvass it: And they made such exceptions to those of the other side, that they discounted as many voices as gave them the majority. This was also managed in to gross a manner, that it was visible the Court was resolved by fair or foul means to have the government of the City in their own hands.
The court here is Charles II and his courtiers, not a court of law. This sense of canvass meaning to scrutinize and tally the ballots after they have been cast fell out of use in Britain, but it has continued to be used in the United States. From the laws of New York of 1778:
That such committee shall be annually appointed by resolutions of each body respectively and shall meet at the secretary's office of this State on the said last Tuesday in May; at which meeting the said joint committee or the major part of them or the survivors of them or the major part of such survivors shall on the said day and on so many days next succeeding thereto as shall be necessary for the purpose proceed to open the aforesaid boxes one after the other and the inclosures therein respectively and canvas and estimate the votes therein contained.
A long way, indeed, from thirteenth-century ledgers to twenty-first century election security.
Sources:
Brewer, J. S., ed. “Accounts of the Duke of Buckingham.” Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 3 of 21, part 1. London: Longmans, et al., 1867, 497. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vol. 1 of 2. London: Thomas Ward, 1724, 530. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon Yeoman’s Tale” (c. 1395). The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. 8.938–41.
A Collection of Apophthegms, New and Old, by the Right Honorable Francis Bacon. London: Andrew Crooke, 1674, 9–10. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Laws of the State of New York (1778), vol. 1 of 5. Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1886, §16, 33. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. canevas, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, canvas, n., canvass, n, canvass, v.
Palsgrave, John. Lesclarissement de la Langue Francoyse. London: Richard Pynson, 1530, fol. 270v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Rogers, James Thorold. A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (vol. 2 of 8). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1866, 511. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Scott, Edward John Long, ed. Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey. Westminster: Nichols and Sons for the Camden Society, 1884, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Mark Foley, 2000, State Library and Archives of Florida.