From
GIZMODO
America's Long, Weird Search for the Perfect Voting Machine
11/04/14 2:40pm
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
Millions of Americans will vote today, and for the first time in years, many of them will use paper ballots. For a nation that's produced some of the most advanced machines in the world, we've had a hell of a time figuring out one of the most important.
However you vote today, take a second (and make sure your machine isn't switching your vote) to consider just how massive a project elections are: Over a single day, millions of Americans filter through gyms, fire halls, and community center to vote, creating individual data points in all are analyzed over the course of a few hours.
It's a remarkable project of numbers and engineering, and it helps to explain why voting is still evolving two centuries after the first American election. To get a sense of how many iterations and failures have plagued voting day, look no further than the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, ...
...
If you go all the way back in the USPTO's archives, you'll find dozens of patents for "improvements to ballot boxes," to outsmart ballot stuffers. According to Richard Bensel's The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, intimidation was common in polling places across the country, ...
...
It wasn't until the late 1880s and early 1890s that the U.S. adopted the so-called Australian ballot, or secret ballot, which allowed voters privacy to make their decisions and then cast their votes—a crucial step towards stopping intimidation at the polls. ...
...
By 1881, one Anthony. C. Beranek of Chicago had patented a "voting apparatus." According to Beranek, "by means of this device all fraud is prevented and ballot-box stuffing impossible." ...
But the machine that really caught on was a 1889 design by J.H. Myers. His design was the first lever-based mechanism, and would become known as the Myers Automatic Booth. According to University of Iowa professor Douglas W. Jones excellent visual history of voting, Myers' lever design went on to become one of the two reigning designs for voting machines, even after they were discontinued in 1982. He described it as a way to "protect mechanically the voter from rascaldom, and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret:"
There were plenty of new ideas that didn't make it, though. ...
Other patents posited ideas that still stick around today. A 1899 patent from Alfred J. Gillespie of Rochester, N.Y. described something many of us will see today: A voting machine with a privacy-enhancing curtain.
By the 1960s, computers had entered into the picture in their earliest form: Punch cards. Enter Joseph Harris, who patented several systems, ... This design was later bought (and sold) by IBM, eventually made its way into hundreds of thousands of voting booths under the name VotoMatic, including the Florida booths that led to the election recount of 2000.
...
There are thousands of other voting machine patents in the USPTO archives, and they range from curious to terrible to important. ... You can check out the rest of the office's own list here.