Free and fair elections
are the cornerstone of a democracy.
Just as America has changed over time,
so, too, have the methods
by which we cast and count our votes.
In the late 1800s,
mechanical voting devices were being introduced
in US elections.
The State Historical Museum of Iowa
has one such technological relic in its vault.
LEO LANDIS: This one dates to the early 1900s.
It's a 1906 model.
And so, Iowa was contemporary with the rest of the nation.
Not the earliest adopter of a mechanical voting machine,
but certainly right up there with other states.
One person goes in, they pull a lever,
it registers their vote, and they're done.
There's no paper ballot that can be, you know,
fraudulently recreated.
And so, it was a way to help guarantee the legality
and the authenticity of the vote count.
SHANE STRAKA: The famed inventor, Thomas Edison,
took out a patent
on a mechanical voting machine in 1869,
but his device was never used.
When it was presented to members of Congress in Washington, DC,
the chairman of the committee responsible for
rubber-stamping the machine for government use scoffed,
"If there is any invention on earth
that we don't want down here, that is it."
It wasn't until 1892,
when another inventor, Jacob Myers,
demonstrated his own machine
in a Lockport, New York town election,
that mechanical voting devices really started to become
viable options for voters.
LEO LANDIS: The curtain would wrap around the voter.
The voter would pull a lever
that then moved the curtain around so you had secrecy.
The idea of a secret ballot was also something
that was fairly new in the late 1800s.
Most Americans, up until the 1880s,
dropped a paper ballot into a box.
And it might be colored,
and so people could tell how you were voting.
And then, as mechanical voting is created,
you do get more and more privacy
because you're an individual inside a booth.
So this would be your ballot initiative line up above here,
and then you had your candidates in the rows below.
And, of course, this one does have the ability
to vote for a straight ticket.
So, if you wanted to voted for a straight ticket,
you would have lifted up and shifted the lever to the right
and that would vote a straight ticket
along whatever line you were selecting.
You did have room on the far left
for different political parties,
and then individual candidates would be listed through the row.
And so, if you were selecting a candidate,
you would have pulled down on the lever
and selected that candidate to make your choice,
and then just move down, race by race.
When you had made your selections by moving the levers,
or voting a straight ticket, or the individual levers,
as you exited, you then would pull this lever.
That would open the curtains mechanically back up
and register your vote.
SHANE STRAKA: In 1898, Myers took his patent,
and along with another inventor, Alfred Gillespie,
who was working on his own patented version
of a voting machine, organized the company
that became the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation.
LEO LANDIS: One of the things that a mechanical voting machine
does is, it does at least allow a degree of reliability
and avoids fraud in an election, in theory.
It had a series of locks that a voter registrar would control
and thus would be more difficult to manipulate.
SHANE STRAKA: The Automatic Voting Machine Corporation
and another company called Shoup Voting Machine Corporation
dominated the market in the US for decades.
The machines were in use all the way into the 2000s
in some precincts.
If you ever used the old lever machines,
odds are, it was one of these two types.
LEO LANDIS: It is said to be one of the first in the state,
if not the first in the state.
And it has been, though, kept in good condition.
It was donated back to the State of Iowa
by the American Voting Machine Corporation in the 1960s,
so at some point,
it went back to the manufacturer of the machine
and then they recognized that it was a machine
that had been used in Iowa,
and it was offered back to the state.
SHANE STRAKA: In the words of its inventor,
this machine was designed to protect mechanically
the voter from rascaldom.
While you won't vote with one of these machines today,
the mission of Myers remains:
An election process that is plain, simple, and secret.
This project is supported in part by
the State Historical Society of Iowa,
Historical Resource Development Program;
the Liberty Fund at Community Foundation
of Greater Des Moines,
and by Margaret J. Gurau of Ames,
to support history, arts and culture,
and nature programming for all Iowans.