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Voting Integrity (2585) Voting Technology (1811) Voting Machines (1389) History (1098) New York (655) Hand Counting Paper Ballots (53) Lever Voting Machine (14) Tammany Hall (1)
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by Bryan Pfaffenberger, PhD May 8, 2008 I've received a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation to study the history of lever voting machines, a subject that has never been studied by a scholar with professional training in the history of technology (or in any other discipline, for that matter). I am currently writing a book tentatively titled Machining the Vote, which covers the history of lever machines from their invention in 1888 to the bankruptcy of the leading manufacturer, Automatic Voting Corporation, in 1983. Highlights of my findings: 1. In my analysis, the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure. With as many as 28,000 parts, their mechanisms reflect an agonizingly difficult period of development, spanning more than twenty years (1888-1919) in which interlocking mechanisms had to be developed that were capable of dealing with the enormous complexity and variety of American elections. The result was a machine that captures in its immutable mechanical operations the voting rules that the American people, in their wisdom, developed in order to capture the will of the people.
2. Time and again, as I mentioned earlier, lever machines won the confidence of election officials and the public, even when doubts were expressed. I'd enjoy sharing the New York story with the commissioners. By 1925, most of upstate New York was voting on lever machines quite happily, but New York City - led by Tammany Hall Democrats -- resisted. New York's first activist Attorney General, Albert Ottinger, vowed to impose lever machines on the city whether Tammany liked it or not -- and by 1926, they were used throughout much of the city. The 1926 election proved to Republicans that, contrary to their suspicions, the New York City Board of Elections had been running fairly clean elections -- the much anticipated, 50,000 vote payoff did not materialize. At the same time, Democrats realized that the machines did not amount to a Republican plot, since Democrats won squeaker elections in districts that normally lean Republican. Suddenly, the voting machine controversy in New York City ended abruptly. Election officials elsewhere had been watching this drama and, when it reached what all agreed was a happy conclusion, voting machine adoption took off throughout the country. Throughout all the years of the Depression, even, the voting machine business was profitable and AVC paid dividends to shareholders. By 1960, about 60 percent of the voters in the U.S. cast their ballots on the machines. In that year, of course, Kennedy narrowly defeated Nixon, leaving Republicans convinced that corrupt Democratic election officials in Chicago and Texas were to blame. In Chicago, the controversy was almost entirely focused on the precincts where paper ballots were still in use. In contrast, where lever machines were used, there were few irregularities. Had lever machines been in use throughout Chicago, it is possible that our nation would have survived the 1960 election without generating a politics of payback that continues to this day. It is quite astonishing to realize that, while the lever machine was under development, inventors came up with just about every voting machine concept that has since been realized, including precinct-scan punchcard technologies, ballot printing machines, and even electromechanical systems that can be seen as predecessors of computerized technologies. All of these technologies produced paper records, however, and all were flatly rejected, both by voters and election officials, as letting the possibility of fraud in through the back door. Today, there are widespread calls to bring paper back into the picture, but the reason is that people do not trust the machines. [Dr. Pfaffenberger's article is discussed by OEN readers at the link provided.] Having studied the history, I strongly believe that there would be no such call for paper if the ugly history of fraudulent practices enabled by paper ballots were known -- unfortunately, the American people have forgotten the lessons they learned a century ago, and I greatly fear that we will have to repeat them in order to learn them again. The truth of the matter is that our American election system, in contrast, to the election administration systems of most advanced democracies, is inordinately decentralized, less than professionally administered in many instances, and politicized. In New York, the people, in their wisdom, created a system of election administration AND a technology that solved the characteristic problems of American elections; to abandon lever machines for new technologies that will not gain voter confidence and, at the same time, re-introduce paper audit trails or paper ballots which have long proven to be prone to election fraud, amounts in my opinion to a potentially disastrous mistake.Bryan Pfaffenberger Department of Science, Technology, & Society University of Virginia
In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Focused mainly on elections, her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews. All material offered here is the property of Rady Ananda, copyright 2006, 2007, 2008. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Tell the truth anyway. Sign this petition: http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/ny_levers_petition
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