NEW YORK VOTING BOOTH - SCANDAL FREE FROM DAY ONE

In another Post Mike said: " New York voting booths: Scandal-free since day one"

To the left is pictured an Automatic Voting Machine, in use from 1898 through the early 1960s, the gear-and-lever voting machine was promoted as an ideal voting technology.

Though its internal mechanism changed over the years, the machine's "three steps to vote" never changed:

1) Pull the handle to close the curtains of the booth.

2) Turn the voting levers over the names of your chosen candidates to expose the Xs.

3) Pull the handle back to register your vote and reopen the curtains.


Sorry Mike but your memory as to the integrity of these machines is seriously flawed.

Tammany Hall staged a small scale come-back in the early 1950s under the leadership of Carmine DeSapio, who succeeded in engineering the elections of Robert Wagner, Jr. as mayor in 1953 and Averell Harriman as state governor in 1954, while simultaneously blocking his enemies, especially Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. in the 1954 race for state Attorney General.

One of the many techniques employed was accomplished with a match book cover; it was folded and placed behind the Voting machine so as to block the registration of votes for candidates slated to lose by Tammany Hall. Additionally, Voting Machine technicians would regularly roll back the speedometer style counters that registered votes for the undesireable candidate.

Using the matchbook cover technique, everything worked fine, except when the curtain was pulled back, the vote on the blocked lever did not register.

The "Good Old Days" may be fine, but the fraud was in play and just as effective as it is today.

Dave Israel