A Vote Against Voting Machines

 By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

November 10, 1956

   FULLY aware that the opinion will have all the force of a snowball hitting a smokestack, I am compelled to join the ill-starred, obstructionist revolt against the voting machine.

   I share the feelings of an old political pro who cast his vote on one of these contraptions for the first time Tuesday.

   "My invariable election day custom in the past," he told me, "has been to tilt back on my head an old derby hat worn especially for the occasion, clench a fat cigar in my jaws, bear down hard on the ballot with a black pencil and exercise my right of suffrage as befits a man of conviction. When you fiddle with those cute little switches on the machine you aren't sure if you're voting or trying to win a package of chocolate creams."

   TO THIS I say amen. The voting machine, somehow, posed a barrier between me and the candidates of my choice. I left the polling place with an uneasy feeling that something had been left undone. I realized later that it was the final business of folding the ballot and ramming it into the box. This tangible assurance of having voted had been eliminated. One had to pin his faith in the responses of something inanimate, hoping that it recorded his partisan feelings in a nonpartisan manner.

   I confess to a certain disquiet when I entered the booth, pulled the lever to close the curtain and found myself alone with my conscience and this complex symbol of man's genius.

   It displayed a column of candidates and row on row of keys. Off in right field, far removed from the main combat, were the three state constitutional amendments which the public had been urged not to neglect.

   I GAVE these my first attention and was caught immediately on the horns of my mechanical ineptitude. There were rows of keys on both sides of these amendments and I sought, with no success, to turn those in the wrong row, which, as I recall, was the left. It never entered my head to try the row on the right. I befuddle easily when pressured by mystery.

   My corrosive anguish finally caught the attention of a poll worker, who set me straight in the manner of a teacher advising a first-grader. I then finished my civic responsibility in a hurry, albeit with cringing embarrassment and a desire for solitude more complete than the voting booth provided.

   My wife said afterward that if I'd had brains enough to take a trial spin before election day I'd have had no trouble. She had happened on a practice machine the previous Friday while shopping, knew all about electronic suffrage and was insufferably superior. That is one of the penalties you pay for not being the family shopper. You don't get around.

   MY PREJUDICE against the voting machine is hard to square with an otherwise broad affinity for progress, which even includes acceptance of the singing commercial and home movies. But I cannot but wonder sometimes where our perpetual striving for better and quicker ways of doing things, featuring radar, mechanical brains, transistors, remote controls and other scientific wonders, will lead.

   The revolution in the kitchen alone provides a fair clue to the new tomorrow. The housewife has to be as much engineer as cook. Meal preparation has become largely a matter of throwing switches, turning dials and setting timers.

   THE VOTING machine provides an even more awesome clue to what's ahead and despite its cold impersonality it is here to stay. We reactionaries, howl as we may, must admit, too, that the machine provides one blessing. It cuts election suspense time sharply. You do not have to stay up beyond bedtime just to be told that Casper McSweeney is leading eight votes to two for congress but these are only fragmentary figures, folks, and do not indicate a trend.

   The machine is now in its primitive  phase, of course. A few years hence it may be expanded to give vocal pitches for cigarettes, automobiles and electric roasters. A fellow receives this bonus now when hearing the returns and he might as well get it while voting. Also this would help defray the cost of the machines.

   It could very well be--though it would take a while--that the time consuming voting process we know today will be eliminated altogether in the rush toward automation. I see ahead the day when aspirants for office are fed into a calculating machine which will yield up the results in a trice. If it fails to yield up the candidates, well--that merely will emphasize the grave hazards  of politics.

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