Early vote casting in the United States was essentially a show of hands or voice vote in front of an official body. In small or even moderately sized towns, it was possible to keep one's own records and do an independent tally of the vote. Of course, this ultimate level of elections transparency had a series of serious implications for voter privacy, coercion and vote selling.Keller, A. M., Mertz, D., Hall, J. L., And Urken, A. Privacy issues in an electronic voting machine. In Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation, Katherine, K. J. Strandburg and D. S. Raicu, Eds. Springer Science+Business Media:New York, 2006.
The private ballot, aimed at eliminating coercion, was one of the first major changes to the U.S. voting process and eventually the Australian ballotThe Australian ballot provides for a uniform ballot, free from bias in design and presentation, printed by the government and cast in secret. took hold throughout the vast majority of U.S. states.Id. at 2. This eliminated problems such as bad ballot design that biased votes towards certain candidates, denying ballots to certain groups of people and simple as well as sophisticated forms of vote-selling and voter coercion. Today, all states save West VirginiaWest Virginia allows ``open voting'' whereby a citizen may choose to show their marked ballot to whomever they choose (W.V. CONST. ART. IV, § 4, cl. 2.). Interestingly, West Virginia also makes it a crime to sell or buy votes. provide for ``secret'' or ``private'' ballots. The requirements to support public scrutiny in a system with secret ballots include ensuring that each voter casts one ballot, that the container in which ballots are cast is initially empty at the beginning of voting, and that no ballots are introduced into the container after the voting is closed. In a paper ballot system, these are largely chain-of-custody concerns and can be ensured by scrutinizing the process and ensuring that there are two people with the ballot materials at all times.
Due to increasing complexity in counting and casting votes during the last century, voting technology has become mechanized. A number of factors have contributed to this move towards mechanization. Citizens have moved from rural to dense urban areas, causing the number of ballots in cities to increase remarkably. Ballots have become more complex; they often have federal, state and local contests on a single ballot, they often vary from precinct to precinct, they can vary by political party for primary elections and they be provided in languages other than English.For example, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- which is not required to provide ballots in non-English languages -- there were over 6,000 ballot styles provided to voters. See: Candice Hoke, post to the Election Law listserv. See: https://majordomo.lls.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/ELECTION-LAW_GL/archives/election-law_gl.archive.0605/date/article-63.html This makes designing and hand-tallying paper ballots difficult and inefficient. Finally, statutory accessibility requirements under state and federal law stipulate accommodations that must be made for voters who don't read or understand English and for voters with physical and mental disabilities.Relevant authorities include the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Public Law 89-10 (VRA), The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Public Law 101-336 (ADA), Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act, Public Law 98-435 and The Help America Vote Act of 2002 Public Law 107-252 (HAVA).
This mechanization has had profound consequences. On the positive side, election administration has become more efficient as large quantities of paper no longer need to be produced, counted and stored securely. The counting process itself is quicker and many non-English language speakers and persons with disabilities can be accommodated with a single piece of equipment.
Increased mechanization has disadvantages. The largest, spurred forth by evidence of mismanagement, malfunction and unusability of election technology, is that we have been too quick to embrace the productivity-enhancing features of computerized technology while not recognizing the vulnerabilities to which this new technology exposes our electoral system.Kohno, T., Stubblefield, A., Rubin, A. D., And Wallach, D. S. Analysis of an electronic voting system. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2004), pp. 27. A more general concern is that the transparency that was at one time a necessary feature of casting and counting votes has been all but lost. This ``enclosure of transparency'' has made the mechanisms of the electoral process opaque to the individual voter or even their trusted representative. Voters can no longer ``observe'' the canvassing process when ``counting votes'' consists of running proprietary software to process vote data. Nor can experts, with whom the public places its trust, easily gain access to and verify that votes are being counted as they were intended to be cast.