May 28, 2009 at 12:03 am
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The notion of automating voting machines goes back to at least Oct. 13, 1868, when 21-year-old Boston telegraph operator Thomas Edison signed a patent application for a battery-operated electrographic vote recorder that instantaneously tallied votes. When patent No. 90,646 was granted, it would be the first of 1,093 U.S. patents for the father of the phonograph and the light bulb. For all of Edison's technical brilliance, the vote counter stymied him in a way that haunts some voting machine makers to this day: He couldn't profit from it. Edison envisioned selling the device to Congress and state legislatures to end tedious roll- call votes. Efficiency, he learned, was the last thing politicians wanted: Roll calls were often designed to stall while one side twisted arms or negotiated compromises. Edison's total vote counter sales: zero.
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One movie - four frames. That's it.
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