---
title: "The Lever Voting Machine, 840 Pounds of Machinery Built to Keep the Count Honest"
url: https://quietmenace.com/tech/lever-voting-machine-history/
author: Quiet Menace Editors
section: Tech
published: 2026-11-03
updated: 2026-11-03
topics: Tech History, Industrial Design
---

# The Lever Voting Machine, 840 Pounds of Machinery Built to Keep the Count Honest

> For much of the 20th century, millions of Americans voted by pulling a curtain shut and flipping small levers. The machine first appeared in Lockport, New York, in 1892 and lasted for well over a century.

In April 1892, voters in Lockport, New York, a town of about 16,000 north of Buffalo, stepped into a booth and voted without a paper ballot. The machine was the Myers Automatic Booth, built by a Rochester inventor named Jacob H. Myers, and Lockport was the first place to use it in a real election, according to a history of the machine in [Cardinal News](https://cardinalnews.org/2024/10/23/voting-machines-were-invented-to-prevent-fraud-in-hand-counts-of-ballots/). New York's legislature had passed a law that year allowing the machines in town elections only.

On Tuesday, as Americans vote in the 2026 midterm elections, the lever machine is a museum piece. But for much of the last century it was the way a large share of the country voted, and it remains one of the most impressive pieces of mechanical engineering that ordinary people ever used. It is worth knowing how it worked, and why it went.

## A machine against the hand count

Myers set out to beat fraud in the hand count, as Cardinal News tells it, and his answer was to remove the paper ballot entirely and let the machine keep the tally. He filed his patent in May 1889, and [U.S. Patent 415,549](https://patents.google.com/patent/US415549A/en) was issued on November 19, 1889. Its claims describe the essentials that every later lever machine kept. Pressing a key advanced a counter. A dog dropped onto the key so it could not be pressed twice. Spring loaded blocks between the keys stopped a voter from choosing more than one candidate for the same office. A bar could press a whole party's keys at once for a straight ticket. And the counters could be locked.

Myers was building on earlier work. The [Wikipedia entry on lever machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_voting_machine) credits Anthony Beranek of Chicago with patenting, in 1881, the first push button machine suited to a general election in the United States. Myers's version made it into service first. The early years were rough. Cardinal News reports that Rochester's first citywide use of the machines, in 1896, was marred by malfunctions and lost votes, and that Myers was fired and the company closed. Others refined the design. Alfred Gillespie added a curtain linked to the main lever in 1899, and in December 1900 a new company combined the key patents of Myers, Gillespie and Sylvanus Davis.

## How a vote was cast

The ritual became familiar to generations of voters. In New York City's version, as [WNYC described it](https://www.wnyc.org/story/300838-your-lever-voting-machines-questions-answered-you-have-them-admit-it), the voter stepped in and pulled a large handle to one side, which closed the curtain and set the machine. Candidates were laid out in a grid, with a small lever at each crossing of a party and an office. The voter pulled the small levers for each choice, and the interlocks inside refused a second choice in the same race. Pulling the big handle back opened the curtain, added one to the counter behind every lever that was down and reset them all for the next voter.

There was no ballot to read and none to argue over. The computer scientist Douglas W. Jones notes on [his illustrated history of voting machines](https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures/) at the University of Iowa that most voters considered the privacy excellent. The two great makers were the Automatic Voting Machine Company, a descendant of Myers's original firm, and Shoup, where Ransom F. Shoup improved the design between 1929 and 1975. The two laid out their grids in opposite directions. Shoup put parties in columns and offices in rows, and AVM did the reverse.

The New York City machines were big. Each weighed 840 pounds and held more than 20,000 moving parts, according to WNYC, and the city's fleet dated from the 1960s.

## What the numbers show

The machine spread fast once it worked. By 1934, about a sixth of all presidential ballots were cast on mechanical machines, and by the 1930s, Jones writes, essentially all of the nation's larger cities had adopted them. In 1944, AVM's own advertising claimed that 12 million voters used its machines.

The best long run data comes from Election Data Services, a firm that has surveyed the voting equipment of election offices across the country every two years since its first study, for the Federal Election Commission, in 1980. We took the lever machine figures from its [November 2006 voting equipment study](https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/surveillance/spotlight/0906/eds_evm06.pdf) and worked out the change. The arithmetic is ours.

| Election | Counties on lever machines | Share of registered voters |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 36.7 percent of all counties | 42.9% |
| November 2000 | 434 | 17.2% |
| November 2002 | 288 | 14.9% |
| November 2004 | 264 | 13.2% |
| November 2006 | 62 | 6.8% |

In 1980, lever machines were the single most common way to vote, covering 42.9 percent of registered voters against 29.3 percent on punch cards and 10.5 percent on hand counted paper. By 2006 the lever share had fallen by about 84 percent. The long slide was well under way before 2000, when the share stood at 17.2 percent. Then the end came quickly. Between 2004 and 2006 alone the share nearly halved, and the number of counties using the machines dropped by more than three quarters, from 264 to 62.

The push came from the [Help America Vote Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act), signed in October 2002 partly in response to the disputed Florida count of 2000. It required states to use federal money to replace lever and punch card systems, and Election Data Services describes 2006 as the deadline for doing so. The machines had also stopped being made. Jones dates the end of production to 1982. Even well kept machines had a weakness that the hand count did not. Every vote existed only as a number on a mechanical register, with no paper to check it against. Jones cites the observation by the researcher Roy G. Saltman that the number 99 appeared in lever machine totals more often than chance would predict, which suggests counters that stuck as they tried to roll over to 100.

![An open silver Votomatic punch card vote recorder in its carrying case, with a printed instruction sheet in the lid](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1777428411566-1966f9f50492?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop)

*A Votomatic III punch card vote recorder from about 1990, now in the Smithsonian's collections. Punch cards were the lever machine's great rival, and they went out with it. Photo by Smithsonian on Unsplash*

## New York's last pull

New York held on longest. In 2006, Election Data Services found that all 62 of the state's counties still used lever machines, along with most of the towns in Connecticut, where only 25 of 169 had switched. New York City finally moved to paper ballots and optical scanners in 2010, to comply with federal law, as the Associated Press reported in a story [carried by KSL](https://www.ksl.com/article/news/us/nyc-brings-back-old-lever-style-voting-machines/26652111).

Then the machines came back once more. In 2013 the city faced a primary on September 10 and a possible runoff only weeks later, and its Board of Elections said there was not enough time to reprogram and test the scanners in between. The state legislature passed [a bill](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/senate-passes-bill-allow-lever-machine-voting-nyc) allowing the old lever machines for the primary and the runoff, and they came back out of the two Brooklyn warehouses where the city stored them. By our count, that was 121 years after Lockport.

The lever machine belongs with the other great mechanical objects that electronics replaced, like the Swiss movements that met quartz in [the Swatch story](https://quietmenace.com/watches/swatch-quartz-crisis-history/) and the spinning disc of [Baird's Televisor](https://quietmenace.com/tech/baird-televisor-television-history/). It was heavy, private and built on a simple idea, that a machine with no ballot could not lose one. That idea did not survive the demand for a paper trail. The pins on voters' coats have a longer history still, told in our piece on [the campaign button](https://quietmenace.com/design/campaign-button-history/). For more from the archive, see the [Tech section](https://quietmenace.com/tech/) and our [tech history hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tech-history/).

---

Filed under: [Tech History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tech-history/), [Industrial Design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/)
Hero image: Photo by Markus Kammermann on Unsplash (Unsplash License)