Since the earliest days of democracy, as the world has sought the ideal form of government, it has also sought the ideal method of voting. The ancient Greeks decided public questions by clashing spears on shields. Colonial America at first favored the show of hands, or splitting into groups. Later the viva voce method, in which a voter would openly declare his preference (and then be thanked in florid fashion by the candidate), gained favor. New England pioneered the secret election, sometimes using grains of corn or beans to signify a yes or no and sometimes using written ballots. Down South, where fewer people could read, open voting persisted in some states until after the Civil War, when literacy requirements became politically useful.

By the mid-1800s paper ballots were widespread, and along with the advantage of secrecy came the greater possibility of fraud. Corrupt political operators stuffed ballot boxes and destroyed opposing votes. To combat such tactics, various inventors turned their attention to mechanical voting. As early as 1849 Jan Josef Baranowski of France described his Scrutateur Mécanique , and a decade later Werner von Siemens of Germany built a primitive Abstimmungsapparate .

Around 1870 at least four different models were used briefly in Great Britain, and more than a hundred American patents were issued for voting machines in the 1860s and 1870s. In most of these the voter pushed a button or inserted a key to drop a ball into a designated bin. Such devices promised to eliminate spoiled and ambiguous ballots, but the balls still had to be tallied, and the possibility of intentional or inadvertent miscounts remained. Few communities judged the machines worth the expense.

The modern voting machine was introduced in a local election in Lockport, New York, on April 12, 1892. It was designed by Jacob H. Myers of Rochester, a maker of theftproof bank safes, who saw his new invention as performing a similar function: fighting vote thieves. Its festive inauguration attracted the sort of turnout normally seen only for a presidential race, including “many aged men, also crippled men,” according to a report by the town board. The New York World and Rochester Herald sent reporters.

Myers’s wood-and-steel contraption was ten feet square, illuminated inside with an oil lamp. Except for size it was quite similar to today’s machines. A voter entered, locked the door behind him, selected candidates from the Democratic, Republican, or Prohibition party by punching keys, and exited through another door, recording his choice by slamming it firmly. Votes were automatically totaled on numerical registers. No tedious counting was necessary, so the possibility of error or fraud was virtually eliminated. There were sixty candidates and two questions on the ballot, but the complete results were announced ten minutes after the polls closed.

The innovation spread rapidly through upstate New York. Rochester used more than sixty-five voting machines in 1896, and by 1904 twenty cities and many more towns had made the switch. In 1920 more than half the state’s population outside New York City voted by machine.

Progress elsewhere was less rapid. The prospect of honest elections did not always appeal to politicians, and the price of the machines—$600 at the turn of the century, $750 to $1,000 in the 1920s—was another obstacle. Proponents could point to the savings in printing, personnel, and litigation costs, but these all afforded ward heelers promising opportunities for dispensing favors and collecting graft.

In addition, there was the usual resistance to anything new. Voters worried that machines would not record their votes properly, though humans did a far less accurate job. As late as 1938 the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution required paper ballots. But as the twentieth century progressed, people became more comfortable with machines of all sorts. In the 1960 presidential election more than half the votes were recorded mechanically.

Today virtually all American elections are conducted by machines, but those of the Myers type are falling out of favor. Punch-card voting was introduced in Ohio in 1960, and optical scanners and video terminals have also recently become popular. As computers perform more and more of the work that used to be done by the mayor’s son-in-law, fraud and incompetence are even less of a factor.

Mechanization can affect people’s basic rights in various ways, some good and some not. But for a century now, one of the most fundamental rights of all—the right to vote—has been safeguarded by machines.