Are Electronic Voting Machines Political?

In the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump accused the electronic voting hardware company, Dominion Voting Systems, of trying to steal the election from him. While these claims were ultimately debunked, the legitimacy of the United States’ election system, and hence these electronic voting systems, was called into question. So why do we use voting systems? And do they present a political issue?

In 1881, the first voting machine for use in an election in the United States was patented. Voting machines were designed to give quick results when many choices are on the same ballot. Especially as the population of the United States grew, it made sense to turn to voting machines as a rapid way to tally votes. However, the addition of technology to anything always has its complications.

In his piece titled Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Langdon Winner argues artifacts are inherently political if their “state of affairs derive from an unavoidable social response to intractable properties in the things themselves” (131). Applying voting machines to this statement, they are inherently political because they require the social response of acceptance from all political parties in the United States to whatever decision they produce. Yet, in theory, voting machines are supposed to be apolitical. They do not belong to a certain party and are not built to favor one party over another. So being inherently political, in this case, presents a challenge and brings up another question: if voting machines are inherently political, is it wise to use them in a politically polarized country, like the United States?

The answer to this question is unclear and may be one that can’t be answered. Voting machines allow us to count votes fast and get results out quickly. They also eliminate some human error, and possibly even some human bias in vote counting, and it would be hard to imagine a world without them. Their pros ultimately outway the cons of being political.

The important thing is that this question of legitimacy and of politics has forced us to reflect on the technology in our lives and its use in making vital decisions. We must consider that technology isn’t always an independent figure, free of politics and outside influences, but rather, a figure, whose properties and forced social responses can become political and even unintentionally give power to one side over another, without us ever being conscious of it.