Electronic Voting Machines: A Political Nightmare
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 (Beranek, 1881). 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” (Langdon, 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, or at least they should be.
Voting machines should be apolitical because politics and varying opinions should not change the outcome of an election. If a machine says that one person won over another, or in a completely non-political area, if one option was simply more popular than the other, that option should win, and if it doesn’t, consequences can occur. Examples include what we saw on January 6th in Washington DC, or even interference from outside countries, incentivized by political motivations. In the first case, one party chose not to accept the result and suddenly the voting machines themselves and the results they produced became a political weapon.
While I am not certain what an apolitical voting machine would look like, and unfortunately therefore cannot make a practical solution for the problem this presents, these recent events have 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.
