History of voting machines
Posted Nov 25, 2005 6:46 UTC (Fri) by
xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to:
EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws by Richard_J_Neill
Parent article:
EFF: Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
It has to do with (a) American elections being run at the local level,
not by an overarching national or state electoral commission, and (b)
American business pushing 'solutions' at the individual electoral
officers, promising accuracy and long-term cost efficiency (ha ha ha).
Some counties in the US have been using privately designed and made
mechanical voting devices since 1891.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111300b.htm
Originally mechanical voting machines were mechanical ballot boxes: step
into the box, pull exactly one lever, step out again. With this system
there is no ambiguity and a high degree of accuracy (providing the
machine works as advertised, and apparently the breakdown rate is high).
But in the 1940s (to cut costs? To make it easier to fake results
without detection?) manually punched cards were introduced, to be counted
by machine. The degree of error due to 'hanging chads' and the like has
never been reliably estimated -- but without a doubt it's far higher than
paper & pencil ballots counted by hand!
In Australia we happily used paper ballots exclusively until this
century, and they're still pretty rare (ACT only as far as I know, and it
runs free software!). The only decent grounds given for introducing
electronic voting machines, incidentally, were improved accessibility for
the disabled.
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