Making Every Ballot Count: U.Va. Professor Reviews History of Voting Machines

Making Every Ballot Count: U.Va. Professor Reviews History of Voting Machines

http://media-newswire.com/release_1075036.html

(Media-Newswire.com) - October 1, 2008 — The current controversy surrounding electronic "touch-screen" voting machines boils down to this: If the machine malfunctions, or — worse — if a hacker subverts the count, can election officials restore the votes that were lost?

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Viewed historically, this back-to-paper movement is ironic. "The first voting machines were introduced in the 1890s specifically to remove paper from the voting process," said Bryan Pfaffenberger, a historian of technology in the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Department of Science, Technology, and Society.

With the aid of a $27,000 Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation, Pfaffenberger is studying the neglected history of the voting machine.

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"Lever voting machines were one of the most remarkable technological achievements of their age," Pfaffenberger said, "but they were expensive to make and difficult to store and transport."

In the mid-1960s, the first punch-card voting systems appeared, weighing a few pounds and costing a fraction of their big, mechanical brethren.

(And we've been suffering ever since!)

Few voters use the machines today, except in the state of their invention, New York, where voters and election officials alike swear by their accuracy.

For Pfaffenberger, the history lesson is that Americans have forgotten the perils of paper ballots.

"It's a sad comment on today's computer-based voting technologies that they can't achieve what an 1890s invention was able to do — namely, convince nearly all voters that their votes had been counted," he said.


— By Charlie Feigenoff

This article originally appeared in Explorations online.