1936: Counting America's 40,000,000 Votes

By Tom Mahoney

NEWS of the election of George Washington as first president of the United States was borne by stagecoach in 1789 throughout the country in about three weeks. Barring a close division of the 40,000,000 voters, the outcome of the current contest of .Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred M. Landon will be made known to a far vaster country in about three hours after the polls close on Nov. 3. This miracle is made possible by the inclusion unofficially in the archaic Electoral system, itself little changed since Washington's day, of every device evolved for the counting of votes and the transmission of results. Ingenious voting machines record and count votes at the same time. Adding machines produce instant totals. Motorcycles, telegraph lines, telephones, press association wires, newspapers, and radio stations distribute the results at a speed unequalled in any other country.

Registration figures in cities where this is required indicate that at least a million, possibly four million, more citizens than the 39,816,522 who voted in 1932 will vote this fall. Chicago has a registration this fall of 1,612,173 against 1,429,774 in 1932. In Philadelphia, the figure has increased from 646,564 to 808,644. Milwaukee, Buffalo and San Francisco have record registrations. Counting machinery, however, has increased with the voters. There will be more voting machines in use this fall than ever before. Election figures are born in the east and speed westward faster than the sun. The Massachusetts village of New Ashford takes pride in being the first community in the country to report its vote. In the face of competition from Mount Washington and other neighbors, New Ashford has been first with figures for the last five Presidential elections. In 1932, two of New Bedford's 34 voters were in the hospital but the remainder began to vote at 5:45 a. m. and at 6:28 a. m., two minutes earlier than in 1928, and while most citizens were still in bed, the count: Hoover 30, Roosevelt 8, was flashed to the country.

Figures from other small points appear on the wires in the course of the day but the first totals of great importance come from the city and state of New York. The election is decided by electoral votes, one for each Senator and Representative, and New York State has 47 of these, the most of any state. In 20 years no candidate has lost New York and won a presidential election.

All of New York City's 2,225,000 votes are recorded by 4,300 voting machines and something like four-fifths of the 2,000,000 upstate residents vote in the same manner. In the metropolis, policemen stationed at each voting place rush the totals to precinct stations where reporters for the City News Association, the local news gathering organization of the New York newspapers, collate them and transmit them to the newspaper offices. So rapidly is this done that most of the figures are known within an hour or two after the polls close and the complete results are known before midnight. Police help on the upstate figures. In Buffalo, motorcycle officers speed from the edge to the center of the city snatching sheets of totals as they ride. With candidates numerous, and over 218,000 voting, the complete Buffalo vote has been compiled in less than 90 minutes.

The New York totals are made possible by the voting machines. Though used in the metropolis only since 1925, the state has long been the center of voting machine development and use. The first machine used, then known as the Myers Ballot machine, made its appearance in Lockport, N. Y., home of the maker in 1892. Two years later, Rochester and Cazenovia, N. Y., tried the experiment. Buffalo and three more cities followed in 1899. At present 95 per cent of the 30,000 machines in service in 3,500 communities throughout the country are products of the Jamestown, N. Y., factory of the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation.

Voting methods underwent few changes in the 25 centuries prior to the development of the voting machines. Assemblies in ancient Sparta announced their opinions by shouting and beating on shields. Athenians of 500 B. C. voted by a show of hands except on the question of exiling a citizen deemed dangerous to the state. In this case, a secret vote was recorded on a clay ballot. Excavators of the American School of Classical Studies recently uncovered 150 of these at Athens, several bearing the names of Aristides. Early Romans used wax-covered slips of wood as ballots.

Early American voting was about as public as that of Greece and Rome. Up to around 1890 most polling places were surrounded by persuasive and often belligerent persons who forced party ballots on the voter and watched him put them in the box. Employers and political bosses stood about to intimidate the voter. The Australian ballot, so-called because it was first used in South Australia in 1856, substituted a single official one for the many ballots and provided secrecy for its casting. At least five per cent of the ballots under this system, however, are almost invariably improperly marked and are supposed to be thrown out. The possibility of error or fraud, and the unavoidable delay of counting persisted.

Inventors of the voting machine undertook to eliminate these factors. First man to give the problem attention appears to have been Jan Josef Baranowski in Paris, France, in 1849. He suggested that adding machine principles be applied to voting and that a closet be provided in which the voter could make his choice by turning handles or pushing buttons opposite the names of candidates. De Brettes in that year and Werner von Siemens in 1859 in Germany constructed primitive legislative voting machines, operated mechanically to cast either white or black balls. Thomas Edison patented a crude machine in 1869. At about the same time, Vassie, Chamberlain, Sydserff and Davy produced devices in England. All involved balls which had to be counted.