Elections as we know them today date from electoral processes developed in the mid to late 1800s in the world's then fledgling democracies. At this time several new electoral concepts were introduced.
One of these was the secret ballot, leading to a need for an anonymous voting interface - usually a printed ballot paper. Another was the gradual extension of the franchise, eventually to near-universal suffrage, requiring an authority to keep printed rolls of the names of eligible electors. The extension of the franchise in turn created the need to manage a process of communicating with, and taking and counting the votes of, the great majority of the adult population.
The history of the use of technology for elections is essentially concerned with meeting these three needs - a voting interface, a list of eligible electors, and the management of the voting process.
In the 1800s these needs were met using the available technology of the day, including printing presses and writing implements such as steel-nib pens, fountain pens and, in the late 1800s, typewriters. However, most processes were then (and in some places still are today) manual. Electoral rolls were written by hand or manually typed, and kept in books and on cards. Ballot papers were distributed, marked and counted manually. Election results were manually calculated and communicated by tally board and print.
The mid to late 1800s saw the beginning of a technological revolution that has continued to the present day. As technology advanced, electoral management bodies (EMBs) applied the various innovations to electoral management.
The invention of electricity and the development of power stations led to electric typewriters, more efficient printing processes, electronic voting devices and, eventually, computers, in addition to all those other lifestyle benefits we now take for granted, such as better-lit and better-heated workplaces. The invention of the internal combustion engine revolutionised transport, making rapid movement of large quantities of material and personnel possible on an unprecedented scale.
The development of mass communication techniques that took place in the 1900s also had electoral implications. Sound and vision recording and transmission, leading to radio, television, telephones, facsimiles, audio tapes, video tapes, compact discs and the internet, have all been used for electoral purposes.
While these technological innovations gradually improved the management of the electoral process from the 1800s to the mid-1900s, it took the development of the computer to revolutionize it.
Today's computers were inspired by punch-card tabulating machines invented in the late 1800s. These in turn were inspired by punch-card weaving systems, first invented in 1801 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French weaver.
The first modern electronic computers were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, to the point where they became commercially viable. One of the earliest electoral uses of a computer was the tabulation of the election results for the 1952 United States presidential election.
By the 1960s many large businesses relied on computers. While the development and use of transistors and integrated circuits had by then shrunk computers from the giant valve-based prototypes of the 1950s, it took the development of the personal computer in the 1970s to make computers accessible to large numbers of users. A parallel advance was the development of user-friendly computer programming, or software, putting the power of computing in the hands of the general user. As advances in computer design continued at an accelerated rate through the 1980s and 1990s, computers became an indispensable part of life in developed countries around the world, both at work and home.
From their beginning as relatively simple automatic calculating machines, computers today are capable of a huge range of functions, including statistical tabulation and analysis, data collection, storage and manipulation, electronic publishing and printing, word processing, communication and entertainment.
Computers did not begin to have a significant impact on election management until the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of the use of mechanical voting machines in the United States, up until the 1970s most election processes still relied on the use of printed ballot papers and laboriously compiled hand-written or typed electoral rolls.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the increasing use of computers in business, first the large main-frame computers, and then the smaller more affordable personal computers, led to more and more use of computers for electoral applications. Early uses included election result tabulation, and electronic storage and retrieval of electoral roll data. As computer systems developed further, electoral uses kept pace, so that computers are today used for virtually every part of the election process in some parts of the world.
Most technological applications that have electoral uses are general in nature, and can be used for many different tasks beyond election management. That said, there is at least one branch of technology that is election specific: mechanical or electronic voting machines. These have largely been confined to elections in the United States.
The first mechanical voting machines used levers to turn counting wheels. The first official use of a lever type voting machine was in Lockport, New York in 1892. Their use was gradually extended, and by 1930, lever machines had been installed in almost every major city in the United States. By the 1960s over half of the votes in the United States were cast on lever machines.
Another type of mechanical voting machine was the punch-card machine, developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Voters used a supplied device to punch holes opposite their preferred candidates' names on the ballot cards. After the polls closed, the results were tabulated by mechanical card counters.
Optical scanning voting systems were developed in the 1970s. Voters make marks on paper ballots to indicate their choice of candidates. A scanning device then reads the marked entries to calculate the results.
In the 1990s, advances in computer technology led to the introduction of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems. These systems allow the voter to directly record votes using a computerised ballot display provided via mechanical or electro-optical devices. Once the voter has made his or her ballot selections, the device processes the data with a computer program and records voting data and ballot images into internal memory devices, which are used to tabulate the results.
By 1996, over 98% of the ballots in the United States' local and and presidential elections were cast using one of these mechanical or electronic methods.
Beginning in the 1990s the telephone was also used as a type of DRE voting system. Voters were able to record their votes directly into computer systems using the key pad on the telephone. They could identify themselves with Personal Identity Numbers (PINs) and record their choices by following recorded messages.
By the end of the 1990s the internet ushered in a new medium for voting. Again, the United States led the way in electoral technological innovations, with internet voting being used for presidential primary elections in 2000.
In looking at the use of technology in elections today it is important to note that different parts of the world are on vastly different points of the technology continuum. The levels of sophistication of technological applications for elections vary widely from country to country. While electronic and mechanical voting systems are commonplace in the United States and in some Asian, South American and European countries, and computers are used for general election management in many developed countries, many less developed countries still conduct elections using the manual techniques similar to those used in the 1800s.
Sources:
ACE Project Vote Counting Application of Technology
World Book 1999, CD-ROM, IBM
Federal Electoral Commission internet site, http://www.fec.gov/elections.htm (and linked pages on Voting Systems), 28 February 2000.
