Voting Methods

THE 2000 FLORIDA debacle has illustrated the central role played by methods of voting in the electoral process. The United States has traditionally seen a patchwork of such methods, with the administration of elections, including the choice of voting methods, left to local authorities. The methods used are largely determined by technological developments, with older methods gradually giving way to new ones, starting with the introduction of hand-counted paper ballots at the end of 19th century and shifting to electronic voting at the end of the 20th century. This process was accelerated by legislation aimed at fixing the problems of the 2000 election, with optically scanned ballots and electronic voting replacing older methods.

Until the late 19th century, voting in the United States was conducted either in public, with voters each calling out loud their choice to election officials, or by using party tickets, a list with the party's candidates for all offices contested in the election. Parties provided these ballots to voters prior to the election, and voters were encouraged to vote a straight party ticket by simply bringing the ticket to the polling place. Concerns about fraud and privacy led to the replacement of these methods with the Australian ballot. This type of paper ballot, listing all candidates and printed at the government's expense, was first used in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856. Voters marked their choice in private and then dropped their ballot in a sealed ballot box. New York was the first American state to use the Australian ballot in 1888. Currently, these hand-counted paper ballots are used by less than one percent of registered voters, primarily in small, rural areas.

Mechanical lever machines were developed and introduced in the United States at about the same time as the Australian ballot. The first use of such a machine was in Lockport, New York in 1892. By the 1930s, machines were used in all major cities, and by the 1960s they were used by well over half of American voters. These machines use a tabular ballot layout, with each row assigned to a particular office and each column assigned to a particular candidate, or vice versa. The voters pull down selected levers to indicate their choices. When the voter opens the curtain surrounding the booth and exits, levers are automatically returned to their original position.

Only the machine has a mechanism to keep the total vote count, and so an independent verification is impossible, making the machine vulnerable to tampering. Furthermore, such machines have a large number of moving parts, which makes their maintenance very difficult. The last such machine was produced in 1982, and they are gradually being replaced. In the 2006 election, only about seven percent of American voters were still using mechanical lever machines, primarily in New York State.

The 1960s brought the next generation of voting methods, represented by punch cards. Punched cards have been in use for keeping statistics since the late 19th century, and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed pre-scored punched cards. Two professors at University of California-Berkeley adapted these punch cards for use in elections, and launched the company Harris Votomatic to sell their product. The system was first used in primary elections in Fulton and DeKalb counties, Georgia, in 1964. By 1986, more than [Page 850]one-third of registered voters in the United States were using them. The system is straightforward: voters punch holes in the card with a device. If the voter is using a Votomatic card, the only information that appears on the card itself is the number of each hole. The name of the candidate corresponding to each hole appears in a separate booklet. If the voter is using a Datavote card instead, the name of the candidate will appear next to the hole the voter must punch in order to vote for that candidate. After the vote, the ballot is either placed in a ballot box, or fed onto a computer that tabulates the total vote at the polling station.

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