A hundred years ago, on November 2, 1920, this gentleman was casting his vote, for either Warren G. Harding or James M. Cox in the 1920 Presidential Election. (I suppose he might have been voting for Eugene Victor Debs, but he doesn’t look like a socialist.)

Whoever he voted for, he cast his vote on a lever-type voting machine, probably manufactured by the U.S. Standard Voting Machine Company. These were commonly in use for many decades thereafter, and when I first voted in 1979, it was in a machine that looked almost like this one. The voter pulled a lever to close the curtain, which unlocked the voting levers. When the voter is finished he (or she, since this was the first election after the ratification of the 19th Amendment) opened the curtain, which caused a counter at the back of the machine to increment for the candidate selected. When the polls closed, the election official unlocked the back of the machine (which locked the levers on the other side) and looked at the count for each candidate.

The picture appeared on the cover of Popular Science, November 1920, and the accompanying article proclaimed that the machines would insure an honest election. The article detailed all of the nefarious things someone could do with paper ballots, and proclaimed that “the machine is honest, and its honesty is fully protected from those who would destroy it.”