21st Century Elections

2000 Election

Votomatic Punch-Card Machine

Palm Beach County, Florida
Computer Election Systems
Berkley, California, late 20th century

First introduced in 1963, the Votomatic Punch-Card Machine was designed to automate the counting of ballots. Based upon a punch card process first introduced by IBM, a voter would slide a pre-scored ballot into its holder and then punch a stylus through an area of the ballot which corresponded to the candidate or issue the voter supported.

In the 2000 presidential election, the Florida ballot had to accommodate ten presidential candidates, the number too great to place in a single column. The solution was the “butterfly ballot,” a ballot that placed the candidates on facing pages with the corresponding hole for the stylus to punch through running down the center of the pages. On this ballot, the Republican candidates were first on the left page and the Democratic candidate followed immediately after. However, the punch holes for the two major parties were the first and the third. The second punch was dedicated to the first party listed on the right page, the Reform party candidate. This counterintuitive placement meant that some voters unintentionally voted for the Reform party candidate rather than for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

To further complicate matters, some voters did not push the stylus through with sufficient force to detached the pre-scored paper from the ballot. These ballots with “hanging chads” were rejected by the counting machine and the votes not counted.

The Gore campaign, once it realized the razor thin margin of the Bush/Cheney victory in Florida, immediately protested and requested a recount for the counties of Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward and Volusia. The issue became increasingly convoluted involving the Florida state courts, the Florida Secretary of State, and the U.S. federal courts. It also brought to the public’s attention the inadequacy of the punch-card voting system. These machines, including this one from Palm Beach county, were soon decommissioned, never to be used again in Florida.

Gift of Sue and John Suwalsky, 2008