ELECTION INTEGRITY, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Al Gore’s Revenge.

Now, let’s stipulate up-front that Gore’s arguments had some merit. The punch card system in use in Florida was, in fact, problematic. Hanging chads, and to a lesser extent, “pregnant” chads (dimpled, but not fully punched, ballot holes) could reasonably leave voter intent somewhat unclear.

However, the decision to decommission lever machines is another matter. According to an excellent 2012 article by Eliza Shapiro in The Daily Beast

The machine was developed in 1895 by Republic Steel of Ohio, says Ransom Shoup, a descendant of Samuel Shoup, the inventor of the lever voting machine, and the former president of Shoup Voting Solutions. “At one point,” says Shoup, “there were 8,000 machines in New York’s five boroughs. There were machines in 41 states.”

And the lever machines were, most importantly, mechanical. They relied on gears and sprockets to move, in essence, odometers on the back panel of the voting machines that corresponded to candidates’ names on the ballot. No amount of chicanery, short of reworking the entire guts of a machine, could cause the lever machines to generate false results. And, absent the ability of elections workers or other sinister political operatives to enter a machine and cast bogus votes (a near impossibility in a state like New York, which has long provided bipartisan supervision of all aspects of its voting process).

The lever machines did not do the math for you—elections workers (from both major parties) had to take the data off the “odometers” and hand-tabulate the numbers, and then telephone them in to their county’s Board of Elections. There was a slim possibility for mathematical errors, transposing numbers, or even, in those places with non-existent opposition party organizations, perhaps more sinister acts—but the machines were also exceedingly easily audited. And, with elections workers manually signing in voters (and comparing signatures to a published log) the number of votes cast needed to match the number of voters. It was not a fool-proof system, but it was pretty darn close.

Progress ain’t always better — and do read the whole thing.