A Brief Illustrated History of Voting

THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science ^ | 2001 | Douglas W. Jones

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EXCERPTS:

Punched Cards for Voting

The standard punched card, originally invented by Herman Hollerith, was first used for vital statistics tabulation by the Baltimore Board of Health.

IBM developed pre-scored punched cards and the Port-A-Punch card punch. In the early 1960's, two professors at the University of California at Berkeley adapted this for voting. Joseph P. Harris, from the political science department, had the idea, and sought help from William Rouverol, of the mechanical engineering department. They made several improvements to the Port-A-Punch, patented them, and formed Harris Votomatic, Inc. to sell the result.

Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machines

In 1898, Frank S. Wood proposed a push-button paperless electrical voting machine for use in polling places (U.S. Patent 616,174).

Occasional patents for such machinery continued to be filed over the next 70 years, but none of these appear to have come to anything until McKay, Ziebold, Kirby et al developed their electronic voting machine in 1974 (U.S. Patent 3,793,505). This machine, known commercially as the Video Voter and sold by the Frank Thornber company, was first used in real elections in 1975, in Streamwood and Woodstock Illinois. Following these demonstrations, several Illinois counties purchased the system and used it between 1976 and 1980, approximately. This system was probably the first direct-recording electronic voting system to be used in a real election. The Frank Thornber Company was one of many small voting system vendors that was eventually swallowed up by Election Systems and Software.

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Copyright © 2001, updated 2003. This work may be transmitted or stored in electronic form on any computer attached to the Internet or World Wide Web so long as this notice is included in the copy. Individuals may make single copies for their own use. All other rights are reserved.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

That’s a very fascinating article. Thanks for posting that.

[aimhigh]

Punch ballots were used in the Al Gore/Bush election in Florida. The Democrats would get a stack of ballots and drive a nail through all the Gore boxes. The chads would be punched out of every Gore boxes. Ballots with no votes, suddenly became a vote for Gore. Ballots with votes for Bush became invalidated by having two votes.

When the election was contested, democrats demanded that any ballots with a dimpled chad be counted. It is impossible for a regular voter to create a dimpled chad. Ballots at the bottom of the nailed stack became dimpled. Stolen elections have been taking place for many, many decades.

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