The Lever Voting Machine Did One Thing Really Well
This is a reflection I wrote for Designlab on product design:
As someone who has worked in election administration and is now pursuing a career in UI/UX, I end up talking a lot about voting machines- but a question I’m asked with surprising frequency is: “what happened to the lever machines?” If you are of a certain age and live in certain states, you will know what voting on those was like. In the election world, the lever machine represents outdated technology. However, outside that world, it seems to represent something that is now missing from the voting experience. It turns out that while lever machines were pretty bad at achieving the tangible goals of election administration, they were great at providing something intangible to voters. Something that modern voting equipment, which improves the process in so many ways, woefully lacks.
What was so bad about the lever machines? For one, they were enormous, heavy, and difficult to maintain, which is not ideal for equipment that needs to be stored, transported, and quickly troubleshooted. They did not create an alternative record of votes for recounts. They could only be used by one voter at a time, creating long lines at the polls. And corrupt election judges found they were pretty easy to manipulate.
But, they did something that’s difficult to reproduce, and that’s missing in current voting technology. They created a ritual with sounds and actions that made voting feel almost as important as it is. And they communicated something about what it means to participate in a democracy. Rituals are how humans have been marking important events for millennia. So voting in a country that mythologizes democracy feels like it should come with the feeling of importance that a ritual confers. The act of stepping into the booth, having the curtain close around you, making your selection with physical switches, and then pulling a mechanical level, which made a distinct sound and opened the curtain for the next voter, may not have been designed to act as a ritual, but it became one over the years the lever machines were in use. It made voting a distinct physical act from the ones performed every day. It made voting feel special.
Further, that curtain communicated something pretty profound about what you were doing while you were in that booth. The idea of individuals being granted the autonomy to choose, in private, their leaders and representatives, is not only unique throughout our planet and its history, it is a revolutionary reimagining of the role of the individual citizen and their relationship to the community. Standing alone in that booth granted you the power to participate in democracy without the interference of someone more powerful. That curtain did not just provide privacy and tell you when you were done- in a way, it was a physical manifestation of one’s autonomy as a citizen. Which is something a plastic partition or a manila folder standing on end just does not communicate.
While current technology does a much better job serving the practical needs of election administration, the lever machines have taught us that future systems can do a better job at serving the more visceral needs of voters.
