IT'S USEFUL TO HAVE AN AUDIT TRAIL.

Various contributors to Insta Pundit have argued for paper ballots, as having the actual record of the voter's choices is reassuring in a way that auditing tallies tabulated on registers or memory chips is not.  There were, in fact, people, including Democrats, raising warnings about possible fraud-by-tampering of the screens or the tabulators, before The Narrative became "baseless allegations of election fraud."  For instance, "Millions of voters going to the polls Tuesday will cast their ballots on machines blasted as unreliable and inaccurate for two decades by computer scientists from Princeton University to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."  After a lengthy review of the ways the technology can go wrong, and the way rapid technological progress leads to the absence of repair parts for older devices (do you really want, dear reader, a Tyco power pack in the space station?) the article notes,

To start with, the new gold standard for voting is paper.

Voters hand-marking their own paper ballots can verify their selection before the vote is counted by a machine. If the election is close or challenged, or if software fails, a paper ballot can be used to audit results. In 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine declared that elections should be using human-readable paper ballots by this year – and voting equipment without such ballots should be removed as soon as possible.

How things change.  DeKalb County currently use a fill-in-the-bubble ballot and optical scanner that would not be out of place at Educational Testing Services or any college grading center office.  Polling places have a supply of official marking pens, which are the successor to the extra-magnetic-graphite people my age or so might recall from standardized tests in elementary school.  Even that approach, which makes tabulating and reporting results relatively easy, might not be good enough.

Matt Luceen didn’t vote for former President Donald Trump in 2020, but he came to Washington last week to protest President Biden’s inauguration, saying the election was flawed.

Mr. Luceen, a supporter of Sen. Bernard Sanders, said he toted signs that read “COUNT OUR VOTES BY HAND,” and “End the charade.”

“We don’t ever really put the paper into piles and count them by hand anymore,” the 34-year-old computer programmer said. “We just trust the machines, and we shouldn’t because we have documented proof that these machines are vulnerable.”

Like everything else these days, there's a partisan split on what is least trustworthy about voting methods.

Democrats say there are too many restrictions. They want easier registration, longer voting periods and extensions of the right to vote to felons and, in some cases, those under age 18.

For Republicans, voter integrity is the priority. They point to accounts of noncitizens casting ballots, and to counties and districts where there are more voters registered than the census estimates could be possible.

Republicans say the answers lie in cleaner voting rolls and stricter ID checks. Democrats say those tactics amount to voter suppression and are designed to discourage minorities and poor people from voting.

That's a different sort of argument for another day. It's the audit trail today.  The latter-day scantron sheets came to DeKalb County around 2000.  In elections previous to that, our ballots were punch cards and each voting booth came with a template to identify which holes corresponded to which candidate or referendum, and a metal stylus to push the appropriate chad out of the punch card; and yes, because of the layout of the punch card, sometimes there were more candidates than there were spaces on one leaf of the template, giving rise to the notorious butterfly ballots.  We know from the 2000 Florida recount that a manual recount of punch cards is harder than a manual recount of scantron sheets.

But Robert Shibley jogged the memories.

It’s obvious that our election “system” cannot be trusted with either paper ballots or hackable computer voting machines. I have a solution: mechanical voting machines. 1. You can’t steal them, as they are huge and obvious. 2. You can’t hack them (without a machinist) and you certainly can’t hack them systematically. 3. It is hard to miscount with them – you literally look at the wheels on the back at the end of the night, add them up with a calculator, and call in the numbers. Done. Want a recount? Have someone else grab a calculator and look at the wheels. And don’t give me this “but they can break” stuff – if we can put in odometer in every car, I think we can handle this, and it’s not like the scanners and electronic machines aren’t breaking all the time.

In The Making of the President 1960, author Theodore White noted that Connecticut, which voted on such machines at the time, was quick to count and report the votes.  But there was no record other than those accumulator tallies of the votes. which means there's no audit trail.

The machines, though, were engineering marvels of the time.

In the late 19th-century, Jacob H. Myers invented his lever-operated “Automatic Booth” voting machine, an engineering marvel that would come to dominate American elections from 1910 through 1980.

Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, has researched the history of voting machines and concludes that Myers’ groundbreaking contraption had more moving parts than any other machine of its day, including the automobile. These early voting machines weighed hundreds of pounds, cost thousands of dollars and would be installed in the corner of the local town hall for decades.

Voting on one of these lever machines was easy. Each candidate for each race had a small lever next to his or her name and Americans voted by pulling down the levers of their chosen candidates. If they wanted to vote along a single party line, they could pull one lever that automatically selected the Republican or Democratic candidates.

I wonder if the professor ever studied mechanical interlocking plants, which have a lot of features in common with voting machines. In the same way that the railway interlocking machinery would prevent the signalman from setting up conflicting routes for trains, the voting machine would lock all other levers once the voter made a choice for an office, and if a voter split tickets, there would be dogs and tappets that would prevent the single party lever from being pulled.  In addition, if a voter pulled back the slide to cast a write-in vote, that action would lock both the slide in the open position and all the levers assigned to candidates for that office.  (To do otherwise would provide opportunities to vote for two candidates, or to cast unlimited write-in votes.)

The voter would pull a large lever to close the curtain and release all locks; pulling the lever the other way to open the curtain would register all the votes cast, advance all the accumulators, and restore the voting levers to the normal position.

But inside the machine, the vote-counting process was incredibly complex, says Jones. There were 200 or more levers on the face of the machine, and behind each lever were mechanisms that prevented the vote from being counted until the final lever was pulled (in case a voter changed their mind). The straight party levers had to be linked to every candidate lever on the ticket and none of it required a single watt of electricity.

“The only power required was muscle power to pull down the small levers to vote for candidates and then more muscle power to move the great big lever that opened and closed the curtain,” says Jones.

Unbeknownst to most voters, the action of opening the curtain on the voting booth was what finally counted the votes and reset the machine for the next voter.

Look closely at the picture of the levers on the voting machine and the picture in my linked post of the mechanical interlocking machine in Harrisburg, and note the resemblance.  Pay particular attention to the patent application diagram in this article.  Those tappets and dog bars in the locking bed are pure Saxby and Farmer.  The voting machine didn't have to be as chunky as the railroad counterpart.  On occasion, though, you'd call the maintainer.

“These machines inspired extraordinary public confidence because of their sheer physicality,” says Jones, who says that Myers’ company, Automatic Voting Machines, dominated 80 percent of the market. “But behind the scenes, it’s not clear that confidence was justified.”

Lever machines were mechanical, and a single missing tooth on a gear was known to cause serious miscounts that were rarely caught by election officials. And Jones says that the machines could be rigged with something as innocuous as the tip of a graphite pencil.

It's the absence of paper ballots that's the trouble. Perhaps election judges would compare total counts on the machine each hour with their tally of voters served each hour, to catch glitches.  How, though, conduct a do-over if the machinery hangs up?

New York retired its machines in 2008.

It was time for these workhorses of democracy to shuffle off. They've been breaking down. They don't provide verification that a vote actually registered (and no paper trail). And there's some evidence they might have had a little trouble counting.

Even so, we'll miss the satisfying gzrrr-CHTHUNK the machines make when you pull the lever. We just can't imagine a "ballot marking device" ever having the same appeal.

Some of the machines now swim with the fishes.  Today, though, the task is to square "in person voting, electronically" with a correspondence between votes cast and votes tallied.