Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1898 — VOTING MACHINES A SUCCESS. [ARTICLE]

VOTING MACHINES A SUCCESS.

A Rochester, N. Y. dispatch says: The facility and accuracy with which the voting machines used in this city election day did their work have caused numerous inquiries to be made regarding them. The voting machine does all the work of canvassers and tally clerks. All the voter has to do is to move a handle over the face that looks like the switch board of a telephone central office, and when he leaves the booth the apparatus clicks, and his vote is not only recorded, but is added on to the total. When the machine is locked at the end of the day it has automatically added up the vote of every candidate. The machine in Rochester worked perfectly, and there will be a bill introduced into the legislature directing the use of the machines all over the state. In Rochester, which is a city of 133,000 people, ’ there were seventy-three standard voting machines employed and the result was that the total vote of Rochester was known in just thirty-seven minutes after the polls closed. This time was required to get the totals of the seventy-three machines together and add them. InSyraciise, which has 40,000 less population than Rochester, the return was not complete until midnight. There are as many stupid men in Rochester as anywhere else, but with the voting machine the dullest voter could not get mixed up. The voter cannot lose his vote by voting for two candidates for the same office, the most frequent blunder noticed when ordinary ballots are counted. There are no springs in the mechanism, so there is nothing likely to get out of order; not one of the seventy-three machines used at Rochester failed to do the work expected of it. There is a little lever before each name on the face of the machine, and the voter picks out his ticket by shifting these from perpendicular to horizontal. If he chooses to vote a straight ticket he merely moves a handle over the party emblem at the head of the column, and when the machine registers it records a vote for every candidate under that emblem. Moving the levers does not record the vote, so there is all the opportunity for correction that one could desire It if* only when the man inside the b<.ut opens the curtains to leave that his vote is counted as indicated by the levers. The totals of the votes cast can only be read when the machine is locked against voting. The voting can only be done when the curtains that hide the voters are closely drawn, and as he steps back the little levers all fly to perpendicular again, and there is nothing by which a man can tell how the man ahead of him voted. Jf a voter wants to vote a nearly straight ticket he does not have to indicate every candidate on his

list. He merely moves the handle of the party emblem under which most of his candidates'are ranged and then moves the individual levers for the exceptions, and the wise machine counts them and cancels the corresponding names on the party ticket. All the inspectors have to do is to see that the man who entered the booth is a legally registered voter and the machine does the rest.' According to the Republican, John Temple Graves, the lecturer, who probably knows as much about court houses as a hog does about heaven, says Jasper county’s new court house is the finest in the United States, and worth several times its cost. It will make a second Chicago out of Rensselaer, and the Jasper county frog ponds will grow seal-skin sacques, it will advertise the county, (has already done so), will make the cows give Jersey milk and all bear heifer calves, the roosters will lay double-yolked eggs, all the boy babies born in the county in the next hundred years, will be republicans, the sheep will grow two crops of wool every year and all the the farmers stock will be bom thoroughbreds. Even the prairie wolves will grow two scalps instead of one, that the lucky fan mer who kills one will get sl4 bounty instead of $7. The grass will have a more luxurious green and will feed twice as much stock as it would previous to the building of that court house. All the mud roads will turn themselves bottom side up and provide asphalt boulevards all over the county. Had we space we could enumerate many more things that are sure to happen, according to John, by reason of the building of that wonderful $165,000.00 court house. Even were John’s statements true, it doesn’t prove that the taxpayers of Jasper county were able to put up such a structure or that the commissioners showed good business sense in so doing.