The Voting Technology Evolution

By Kim Breitfelder

As Americans go to the polls this month to elect a president, it’s difficult not to recall the 2000 election debacle. Few can forget images of bleary-eyed officials poring over butterfly ballots, trying to divine voter intention. As we move into a new era of electronic voting, it’s worth looking back at how voting technology has evolved.

Until the mid-1850s, voters in popular elections usually cast their votes either by oral calls, or by writing their votes on a piece of paper. In 1856, the state of Victoria in Australia adopted the first pre-printed paper ballot, a practice that spread quickly around the world.

Edison Invents the First

Many proposals promised more efficient and supposedly foolproof automatic voting technologies in the 19th century. Thomas Edison’s first patented invention was an automatic vote recorder. He took interest in voting machines after reading that government officials were considering adopting them. By adapting an earlier technology — the printing telegraph — Edison devised a system for recording legislators’ “yea” and “nay” votes. Each voter pressed a lever, which recorded votes on a paper strip. Unfortunately, because politicians used roll-call votes as opportunities to state their opinions, no one seemed interested in using the machine.

Machines that could record or count votes in popular elections proved more successful. Lockport, New York used the “Myers Automatic Booth” to count votes in 1892. The machine used levers marked with candidates’ names; mechanical counters recorded the number of times each lever was pressed. At the end of the voting period, election officials simply read the numbers to tally the votes. While these machines came to be the most common type of voting technology, recounts in contested elections could not be conducted.

Computer Technology: The Votomatic

The advent of computers brought considerable excitement about their potential to count votes. In 1964, two Georgia counties became the first to use the Votomatic, an IBM-designed machine that punched holes in cards to record votes. Computers read the cards to tally the votes. By the 1980s, the Votomatic was the most widely used system in the United States. This technology was not without problems, however. As the Florida voting problems in the 2000 U.S. presidential election illustrate, defectively punched cards made it difficult to interpret some voters’ intent. IBM stopped making Votomatic machines in the 1970s, and the U.S. government recommended discontinuing their use in 1988.

Optical Readers Eliminate Problems, Reduce Cost

Like the Votomatic, optically read ballots use computer-scanned cards or sheets but but relied on “electronic eyes” to detect marks written or drawn on the sheets. Optically read ballots eliminated the need for the special voting machines required to punch cards in the Votomatic and similar systems, and so eliminated a whole set of potential problems caused by faulty voting machines or their incorrect operation. They also made running elections less expensive.

Today, these machines are also being abandoned in favor of direct-recording electronic vote counters (DREs). This latest voting technology, however, brings with it many security concerns. DREs are electronic voting machines linked to a computer. In the spring of 2004, India — the world’s largest democracy — became the largest DRE user. Other countries, including the United States and the Netherlands, are also making the shift to electronic voting.

Electronic voting, however, still necessitates setting up temporary polling places during elections, and voters must still travel to those places to vote. Many have suggested that Internet voting technology would make it possible for voters to cast votes from home.

The famous architect, futurist and engineer, Buckminster Fuller, championed a vote-from-home system in the 1960s. He believed voters could simply call in their votes by telephone. They could use their phones to dial in a personal identification number and their votes efficiently and privately. However, many thought voting in private could make it easier for dishonest citizens to cast fraudulent votes, and they rejected Fuller’s ideas. People are voicing those same concerns today about Internet voting. Nevertheless, Arizona used Internet voting in the presidential primaries, and some predict that by as early as 2008, many states will allow their citizens to cast absentee ballots by way of the Internet.

 

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