History of the Vote
VOTE! VOTE! I am sure you are hearing this one, very powerful word a lot lately. Rightly so, it is important and it is a right many other countries do not have. Have you ever wondered about the history of the vote?
The constitution doesn’t say exactly how Americans should vote in elections. Article 1, Section 4 simply states that it is up to each state “the times, places and manner of holding elections.”
Did you know that the first 50 years of American elections was not done in private? Instead, voters went to the local courthouse and publicly yelled their vote. (only white men at that time. No others were allowed to vote) At the polling place, campaigning and drinking were both allowed and most think that is why turnout rates were so high! (can you imagine that today?)
The first paper ballot began appearing on the scene in the early 19th century. In the beginning, the ballots were nothing more than a scrap of paper, and the voter wrote their candidate on the paper and dropped it in the box. Partisan paper ballots were all the norm in the second half of the 19th century, which led to frequent accusations of voter fraud. The solution was The Australian paper ballot, where the candidate’s names were printed on the ballots and handed to the voters.
In the late 19th Century the “automated booth” was engineered and was a huge part of our elections from 1910 through 1980. These early voting machines weighed hundreds of pounds and cost thousands of dollars. Many voters had a lot of confidence in these machines and the accuracy of counting their votes. However, these lever machines had gears and a single missing tooth on a gear was known to cause serious miscalculation. From here we went to punch cards and “hanging chads”:(a chad is a small rectangle of paper that’s popped out of a punch card when the voter made their selection)
The “Help America Vote Act of 2002” was passed to mandate higher standards for voting equipment. Soon after the high-tech touch screen technology was introduced and many states spent millions of dollars to update their systems. However, these systems have not been without their flaws: many have software glitches and glaring errors. As a result, many states have scraped these machines and gone back to paper base ballots, due to the fears of the machines being hacked. Today the most popular way to cast your vote is the optical scanning technology, which was inspired by the fill-in-the-bubble forms.
So there you go, a little history on the voting process.
