When Pulling a Lever Tallied the Vote

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/pulling-lever-tallied-vote-98774074/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&spMailingID=50391047&spUserID=NzU3Njg4NDk0NTQS1&spJobID= [login to see] &spReportId=MjgyMDU2MzU3OQS2
Throughout much of this country's post-Revolutionary history, writers and politicians have invoked the ballot as a symbol of a right fundamental to our democracy. Now, as the nation moves to vote once more, it seems appropriate to pay homage to another powerful symbol of our right to make our voices heard. Occupying pride of place among the artifacts in the current exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History "American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith" is an 1890s prototype of the classic gear-and-lever booths in which I and many Americans cast their votes.

As far back as the mid-19th century, political reformers sought to make voting more systematic (and, they hoped, more honest). In the late 1890s, New York inventor Alfred J. Gillespie devised a gear-and-lever machine (derived from earlier patents by Jacob H. Meyers) that offered privacy while limiting one man to one vote. (Women were denied the vote until 1920.) The advantages of Gillespie's machine over the ballot box were many, including that it kept a running count, thus speeding up the reporting of results. The machines also could be locked by officials when voting was over, preventing—or at least reducing—tampering. This extraordinary new device wowed the voters in an 1898 town election in Rochester, New York. As the Brooklyn Eagle reported: "Where other cities were hours and even days in counting their votes, Rochester knew the complete result in the city on every office—State, County, Assembly, Senate and Congressional—in just thirty-seven minutes. There was not a mistake, not a hitch."