Vintage Voting Machine Recollections (Fall 2014)

November elections are on the horizon, and once again City Hall will be staffed with volunteer election judges while residents file in to cast ballots. For decades, this scenario has repeated itself fairly consistently because the building has been East Gull Lake’s designated polling facility. 

The machine pictured here was delivered for the August primary and sits ready to collect votes for the upcoming general election.  Also pictured are voting stations, assembled for privacy.  While voters, ballots, volunteer judges and divided stations have been staples for this process, there was an era when ballots were color coded to match vintage metal bread boxes!

Various colored sheets of paper were printed with names of either local, state, federal or school district candidates.  After marking their choices, voters folded and deposited the ballots into slits made in the tops of the respectively color coordinated kitchen antiques.

This might be hard to visualize if you’ve not been voting here long enough to actually remember those days.  Kind of like 8 party telephone lines, which is another story for future sharing.