Return to gear and lever voting machines

A large fraction of Americans doubt the legitimacy of recent elections. A number of potential methods of manipulating the vote exist, including electronic, unmonitored drop boxes, and absentee ballots. Election integrity became a subject of widespread concern immediately after the 2020 election in which the vote totals for Donald Trump dropped sharply several times during the course of counting. In counting votes, only increases, not decreases should be possible.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, “number scientists” whose specialty is analyzing the likelihood and unlikelihood of number sequences, recognized extremely unlikely number sequences in vote totals which indicated fraud. 

Some time after the election, a very careful study of cell phone “pings” which accurately trace the path taken by the carrier of the phone and photo images of the carriers of the phones placing handfuls of envelopes, presumably with filled-in ballots, into ballot drop boxes provided concrete proof that “mules” were illegally stuffing ballot boxes. This study done by Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of the True the Vote produced concrete evidence of sufficient fraud to steal the election from Trump. As a result of this fraud, Joseph Biden was installed in the White House and granted the powers of the president of the United States. In May 2022 the documentary film 2000 Mules was released, which described story referred to above.

After the release of 2000 Mules, anyone wanting to present the evidence that Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud would refer to that movie, not the evidence used by numbers scientists. But electronic systems would still be in place for the 2022 mid-term congressional elections which produced, in the House of Representatives, a much smaller Republican majority than expected and a big victory for Ron DeSantis as Republican governor of Florida who, as a result, emerged as a challenger to Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

Some have proposed that paper ballots be used to assure election integrity. But using paper ballots would present formidable problems; votes would be open to ambiguity due to unclearly marked ballots and tallying election results would be awkward, relatively expensive and time-consuming.

Far better would be a return to the mechanical gear and lever voting machines widely used in American elections from the 1890s until the recent past.

With gear and lever machines there would be no communication between machines. There would be no ambiguity regarding a voter’s choices. Each voting machine would register the voter’s choices and keep a running tally of votes cast. At the end of the voting day, vote totals would be easily and quickly conveyed to boards of elections for final tallying.

With gear and lever voting machines a voter would enter the voting booth, pull a lever that closes the privacy curtain and prepares the machine for registering the voter’s choices by the turn of a lever. Having made his or her choices, the voter would return the lever to its original position, thereby adding those choices to running totals, opening the privacy curtain and readying the machine for the next voter.

A campaign for legislation mandating the use of gear and lever voting machines should be directed at the appropriate level of government (state or federal). Doubts about election integrity raised by electronic voting systems, at the very least, would be a thing of the past.    

Robert E. Kaplan is a historian of modern Europe, PHD, Cornell University.

Image: Library of Congress