I see lots of debate on paper vs electronic voting, but I don't see anyone who's mentioned another option: mechanical voting machines. For those who haven't enc

I see lots of debate on paper vs electronic voting, but I don't see anyone who's mentioned another option: mechanical voting machines. For those who haven't encountered one, here's how they work: 1. You go to your local polling place, show the volunteer your ID, and sign a book next to your name. They check your signature, then walk you to a voting machine and unlock it. 2. You go into the voting booth and pull the operating lever to the right. This closes the curtain, increments a counter, and unlocks the vote levers. 3. You make your vote selections on the voting levers. The machine prevents spoiled ballots with a mechanical interlocking: if the ballot says "pick any two", the other vote levers will be locked out once you've selected two of them. 4. Once finished, pull the operating lever to the left. This increments various counters for your votes, clears the voting levers, opens the curtain, and relocks the machine. At the end of the night, the election volunteers open the back of each machine and read off the values of each counter, then report the results to the election board. There, the numbers are subtracted from the original counter values (the counters are non-resettable) and cross-checked to ensure validity (casting a vote increments both a vote counter and various 'checksum' counters), then aggregated with the other machines to get the final result. This system has, in my view, most of the advantages of the other two systems: it is very difficult to tamper with (all the voting machines, once configured, are cross-checked and sealed; the seal is on the side of the machine and can be inspected by any voter to detect tampering), anonymous (all votes are aggregated in-machine), and provides fast counting (all of the counter values are entered into a digital system at the end of the night). Unfortunately, they were banned by the Help America Vote Act, and are sometimes panned as difficult to use. (I never got a chance to use them myself, as New York replaced them shortly before I became eligible to vote, but I got to go into the voting booth with my parents and even as a nine-year-old they didn't seem especially confusing to me.) Also, the machines are complex mechanical beasts, with some 28,000 moving parts, and they're probably becoming increasingly difficult to repair. Even if mechanical voting machines are a thing of the past, I think it's important to at least look at them to see how they provided for the important aspects of a voting system, and possibly take some of the ideas to be used in current and future systems.