Voting Technology: Overview

Introduction

Voting technology in the United States evolved significantly over the twentieth century. During that period, several distinct forms of casting and tabulating votes emerged and existed alongside one another, varying among states, towns, and even polling locations. Among them were paper ballots, which were filled out and counted manually and which persisted into the early twenty-first century in some districts. Other voting technologies used during the twentieth century included lever-based voting machines that recorded votes via mechanical counters; punch card ballots that required voters to remove small pieces of paper next to the names of their chosen candidates; and ballots designed to be read and counted by optical scanners. With the introduction of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in the 1970s, the United States began a shift toward electronic voting technology that would only accelerate during the 2000s, after concerns regarding the efficacy of punch card ballots and lever machines led the US government to ban their use in federal elections. DREs became increasingly advanced, and electronic ballot marking devices—computerized systems used to mark ballots but not to record or count votes—began to be adopted. In addition, some localities within the United States began to experiment with internet-based voting during the 2010s, initially as an alternative to the use of printed and mailed absentee ballots.

Amid such developments, however, some lawmakers and voter-advocacy groups have argued that the United States must exclusively use voting technologies that incorporate paper ballots, asserting that wholly electronic technologies present an unacceptable risk of fraud or outside manipulation and that only paper offers the physical records necessary for validating election results and guarding against technical errors. Supporters of electronic voting technology, on the other hand, contend that the potential risks do not outweigh the technologies’ potential benefits, including increasing voter turnout, improving voting access for people with disabilities, and reducing the amount of time needed to vote.

Understanding the Discussion

Ballot marking devices (BMDs): Electronic voting machines used to complete and print ballots but not to record or tally votes.

Direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines: Voting machines that record and tally votes electronically and that may or may not produce paper records.

Help America Vote Act (HAVA): Election reform legislation enacted in 2002 that, among other provisions, established standards for the testing and certification of voting technology.

Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE)Act: A bill passed by the US House of Representatives in 2019 that would require the use of paper ballots in federal elections.

Voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT): A physical record of an individual’s vote printed by a direct-recording electronic voting machine; also called a “voter-verifiable paper audit trail.”

History

During the United States’ earliest years, elections were conducted by voice vote and hence were not secret. Paper ballots filled out by hand and counted manually were adopted in the nineteenth century and served as the primary form of voting technology. Those evolved from shared public ballots with lists of signatures to individual, secret ballots deposited into locked ballot boxes. A turning point came in the 1890s when the lever-based mechanical voting machine was developed. Introduced widely during the early twentieth century, that variety of voting machine allowed voters to select their preferred candidates through the use of movable levers and then lock in their votes, which were tallied using mechanical counters within the machine.

Two additional voting technologies emerged during the mid-twentieth century, each of which featured paper ballots marked in a manner designed to improve the ease of tallying votes. Punch card voting, devised in the 1960s, required voters to indicate their chosen candidates by using a stylus or similar implement to remove small, perforated pieces of paper—widely known as “chads”—from the ballot itself. Although typically counted by machine, punch card ballots could also be read by hand when necessary, including during recounts. The mid-twentieth century also saw the development of paper ballots designed to be read using optical scanner devices, for which the voter was required to use a writing implement to fill in an oval or other shape next to the name of each preferred candidate.

The final decades of the twentieth century saw further innovations in the realm of voting technology, particularly with the advent of direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines. Popularized in the 1970s, DREs advanced over the subsequent decades, eventually coming to incorporate technology such as touch screens. DREs made by differing manufacturers at times offered different features, but such machines typically enabled voters to cast votes for their preferred candidates by pushing buttons or selecting names on a screen. In addition to facilitating the casting of votes, DREs typically also recorded and counted the votes submitted, storing that data within a built-in memory unit. Many DREs maintained exclusively digital records of the recorded votes, while some could generate voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs), paper printouts that allow voters to confirm that their votes were recorded correctly.

In addition to DREs, electronic voting technology came to include electronic ballot marking devices (BMDs), digital machines that enabled voters to fill out their ballots using touch screens or similar interfaces. The BMD would then print out a paper ballot, which would in turn typically be counted using an optical scanning device.

Despite the numerous innovations in voting technology made over the twentieth century, new technologies and processes introduced during that period did not automatically supersede those that came before. Rather, new technologies were adopted sporadically, leading some states, towns, or precincts to use vastly different voting technologies than their neighbors. By 1980 elections held within the United States used lever machines, punch card ballots, optically scanned ballots, and early DREs, in addition to manually counted paper ballots and some hybrid approaches. The popularity of manual counting, lever machines, and punch cards declined significantly over the next quarter-century, while optical-scan ballots and DREs became more widespread.

A key point in the decline of those earlier technologies, particularly punch card ballots, came in November 2000, when a close vote between presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore in the state of Florida prompted a recount of votes in several counties. The process of counting those votes was complicated by Florida’s use of punch card ballots, which in general could be accurately read by machines only if the perforated chads had been removed completely from the paper. In numerous cases, however, chads remained partially connected to the ballot by one or more corners or were dented but not cut away, thus requiring the individuals carrying out the recount to examine the ballots by hand to determine each voter’s intent. On December 12, 2000, the US Supreme Court ended the recount, and Bush was declared the winner of both Florida and the presidency. However, the controversy surrounding the use of punch card ballots continued, prompting calls to modernize the United States’ election infrastructure.

In response to such concerns, in 2002 the US Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which, among other stipulations, established standards regarding the testing and certification of voting technology. HAVA not only provided funding for new voting technology, particularly DREs, but also specifically prohibited the use of punch card ballots and lever-based voting machines in federal elections. In the years following HAVA, voting procedures in the United States shifted significantly, and optical-scan ballots and DRE machines became the most common and second-most common forms of voting technology, respectively, by the year 2004.

Voting Technology Today

During the 2010s, optical scanner technology remained the most prominent form of voting technology in the United States. In the 2016 election, two-thirds of registered US voters lived in districts with optical scanners available, and just under half lived in areas relying solely on optical scanners. Twenty-eight percent of registered voters had to use DRE machines, while small percentages lived in areas using mixed approaches or hand-counted paper ballots. The capabilities of the DRE machines in use varied based on location; however, the advocacy group Verified Voting Foundation found that more than 70 percent of the locations using DRE machines did not offer VVPATs.

The continuing prevalence of DRE machines proved to be an issue of concern to some lawmakers and voter-advocacy groups, who argued that electronic voting machines could facilitate election fraud or be hacked by malicious organizations or foreign governments. Of particular concern was the inability of most DRE machines to produce VVPATs or other paper records, which opponents of such machines deemed essential to maintaining the integrity of US elections. In light of such concerns, in June 2019 the US House of Representatives passed the Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act, legislation that would require the use of voter-marked paper ballots in federal elections and prohibit voting machines or ballot scanners from being connected to the internet, among other stipulations related to election security. The bill was subsequently introduced to the US Senate, where it was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration.

In addition to the continued use DRE machines, the 2010s saw the introduction of experimental online or mobile voting technologies in a limited number of areas. In 2018, for example, West Virginia introduced a program that allowed West Virginian voters living abroad to vote using a mobile application. Some state political parties also experimented with using mobile applications not to cast votes but to collect election data, including during the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses, the results of which were set to be transmitted to the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) through the smartphone application IowaReporterApp. As a result of technical errors within the application, however, the IDP ultimately reverted to traditional means of reporting caucus results, and the publicity surrounding the failure of the application prompted public debate regarding the use of electronic voting technology that had not been thoroughly vetted and determined to be functional and secure. Nevertheless, proponents of electronic voting technology continued to argue in favor of technologies such as DRE machines, BMDs, and mobile voting applications, asserting that such technologies offer significant benefits to American voters and to US democracy as a whole.

States responded to the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to make voting safer and easier for elections held in 2020, including the federal elections. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, beat incumbent president Donald Trump, a Republican, in the election, prompting Trump and his supporters to allege that Democrats had stolen the election through fraud. Though the allegations were disproven in multiple court cases, by February 2022 Republican-dominated legislatures in nineteen states passed voting laws that reversed voting practices put in place during the pandemic and/or instituted new provisions.

Georgia's state legislature passed Election Integrity Act of 2021 (SB 202), which, among many other provisions, allows county elections officials more discretion regarding the ratio of BMDs per number of voters for local, lower-turnout elections but leaves in place the 1:250 BMD-to-voter ratio required for statewide general elections. SB 202 also requires that ballots be printed on so-called security paper and with precinct name and identification number included at the top; makes digital images of marked paper ballots part of the public record; and sets forth requirements regarding improvements in election officials' public notice of voting machine testing and calibration.

About the Author

Joy Crelin is a freelance writer and editor based in Wethersfield, Connecticut. She holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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