Return to paper ballots? Not so fast.

History shows that the US gave them up for good reason.

By Bryan Pfaffenberger

from the May 30, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 2

Charlottesville, Va. - The paper ballot is making a comeback. Across America, election officials are ending their experiment with electronic touch-screen voting machines – a failure in the view of most experts – and replacing them with computerized tallying of paper ballots.

Some want to push the machines out entirely. To restore public confidence, they say, let's count the ballots by hand and allow citizens to observe and videotape the process.

But wait a minute. Today, fewer than 1 percent of America's votes are counted by hand. If hand counting is so great, why did we give it up?

History gives a clear answer and a sharp warning: We gave up hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) for good reason – and resuming their use might be a very bad idea.

Advocates portray the HCPB system as rooted in the origins of American democracy, but it didn't emerge until about a century later.

Before HCPB, Americans voted according to a party-ticket system. That meant parties distributed ballots at the polls and voters handed their ballots to election judges in public. This led to a host of election abuses, including vote buying, voter intimidation, and deception.

HCPB, which arose in Australia during the 1850s, was designed in part to prevent those abuses. It featured state-printed ballots and compulsory private voting It made its American debut in an 1889 Massachusetts state election. But some felt that this "Australian" system would introduce serious new problems.

One of the skeptics was a New York inventor named Jacob Myers. Just one day after the Massachusetts election, Myers unveiled the great-granddaddy of the mechanical-lever voting machine. He designed his machine to retain the merits of the Australian system while, at the same time, remedying its defects.

America thus had two ballot systems competing to fix the problems of the party-ticket system: the Australian, which is the HCPB system, and the "American," which employs the voting machine – and, at least initially, kept paper out of the picture entirely.

Why did Myers's American method end up trumping the Australian alternative?

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page