Machining the Vote: A brief history of lever voting machines

by Bryan Pfaffenberger, PhD

May 8, 2008

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.

3. Although lever machines do not produce an independent audit trail, this is -- as software engineers say -- a feature, not a bug. In the 1880s and 1890s, paper ballots emerged as the locus par excellence of election fraud; lever machines were expressly designed to take the human element out of every aspect of the vote recording and counting process in order to eliminate fraud that was gravely undermining Americans' confidence in their democracy.  

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.  

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