10/16/2007:
In the words of Jacob H. Myers, his new voting machine would “protect mechanically the voter from ‘rascaldom’, and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret.” Mr. Myers made this statement in 1892 in Lockport, New York. His new automatic booth then appeared in 1895.
This new invention for recording votes was catching on. By 1889, it had caught the interest of the two newest state legislatures in the United States.
The Daily Argus on this date in 1889 reported that the legislatures of North and South Dakota were considering the advantages of a “vote recorder machine.”
The machine in question was the invention of a St. Paul, Minnesota printer. He also just happened to be an independent candidate for a local office. His inspiration for the invention was losing an election that he felt was ‘questionable in its vote counting.’
Nerved by the idea that voting fraud had possibly taken place, he set to work and “Rhine’s Ballot System and Vote Recorder” became a reality. He believed that if the invention proved to do what it was designed to do, it would become the “best preventative of election fraud ever devised.”
By pressing a button, the voter could register his vote for any candidate he wished to vote for. And it would allow the voter to vote only once for each candidate. An interesting feature of the new machine was that it rang a bell if the voter attempted to vote twice for a candidate. This alarm, the inventor claimed, was “sure to make a ‘chestnut’ out of the voter in front of others.”
With the new machine, votes were tallied as rapidly as they were cast. As a result, when the polls closed, the new ballot system was able to ascertain the results at once. This allowed election officials to avoid the tedious process of personal counting and handling of the tickets. The old system was certainly a temptation to perpetrate frauds.
The Daily Argus article concluded that this new machine was certainly worthy of consideration. By the 1930’s voting machines were in use throughout most of the United States.
By Dave Seifert
History of Voting Machines. http://www.glencoe.com/sec/socialstudies/btt/election_day/history.shtml