Voting is both a duty, a right, and a privilege. In fact, many say that it is the most important activity we can carry out as American citizens.
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice …
– Lyndon B. Johnson
The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves…
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
– John Quincy Adams
When there’s a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there’s public input, the people usually win.
– Morgan Carroll in “Take Back Your Government:
A Citizen’s Guide to Making
Your Government Work For You”
Yes, voting is a right and a duty for us all. BUT, the US Constitution doesn’t say exactly how Americans should cast their ballots.
Article 1, Section 4 simply states that each state determines “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.”
Over the past 200 years, the mechanics of voting have evolved from open-air “voice votes” to touch-screen digital consoles.
Voting through the years
For the first 50 years of American elections, white men went to the local courthouse and publicly cast their vote out loud.
At the courthouse, a judge would have them swear on a Bible that they were who they said they were. Then the voter would announce his chosen candidates in each race.
Campaigning was allowed at the polling place, and a drunken carnival atmosphere developed explaining why elections in the voice-voting era had turnout rates as high as 85 percent.
Kentucky kept it up as late as 1891.
The first paper ballots began appearing in the early 1800s, and these paper ballots were scraps of paper where the voter scrawled his candidates’ names and dropped into a ballot box.
By the 1850s, party officials distributed pre-printed fliers to voters listing only their party’s candidates. They were called “tickets” because they resembled train tickets. Voters could legally use the pre-printed ticket as their actual ballot to vote straight down the party line.
Partisan paper ballots led to accusations of voter fraud. The solution came from Australia, which pioneered the first standardized, government-printed paper ballot in 1858.
The so-called “Australian ballot,” printed with the names of all candidates, was first adopted in the United States in 1888.
As technology advanced, Jacob H. Myers invented his lever-operated “Automatic Booth” voting machine. Each candidate had a small lever next to his or her name and the voter pulled down the levers of their chosen candidate.
But a single missing tooth on a gear could cause serious miscounts that were rarely caught by election officials. And the machines could be rigged with something as simple as the tip of a pencil.
As computer technology advanced, the first punch card voting system came out in the 1960s, after IBM used punch cards to calculate data.
During the Florida recounts, election officials had to examine each punch card ballot by hand to determine if “hanging or dimpled” chads should be counted or thrown out.
In the wake of the Florida recount, Congress passed the “Help America Vote Act of 2002,” which mandated higher standards for the voting equipment used in federal elections.
The “Help America Vote Act” assumed that touch screen technology was going to be the future of voting.
However, not all the new touch screen voting machines were created equal and software glitches produced some glaring errors in voter tallies.
In the close 2016 presidential election, electronic voting machines in 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers.
As a result, several states have scrapped their expensive touch screen voting machines and switched back to paper-based ballots.
Soon after the punch card voting machines were used in the 1960s, a competing voting technology, “optical scanning” machines – the fill-in-the-bubble scannable forms – were introduced in some states.
Today faced with the COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainty about exposure to this deadly virus, Kentuckians are lucky that voting has never been easier. The Secretary of State and the Governor agreed early on that voting Absentee by mail, by drop box, expanding early voting (M-F and Saturdays) would alleviate much of this anxiety.
If you have already voted, thank you! If you haven’t, Vote!
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First three photos from “A Brief Illustrated History of Voting” by Douglas W. Jones,
The University of Iowa Department of Computer Science. Copyright © 2001, updated 2003.