WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
Optical scan machines have their roots in the early twentieth century with the development of optical character recognition technology, pioneered by a German inventor named Gustav Tauschek. His optical reader was mechanical, intended for use by illiterate or semiliterate office workers who wanted to go about their days without worrying about onerous tasks like reading. The process was computerized in the fifties as a text-to-speech system intended for visually impaired people and later adapted as a simpler system of recognizing simple marks for use in things like standardized tests.
Touchscreen technology was invented in the seventies by a professor at the University of Kentucky named Sam Hurst. The technology was immediately recognized for its potential, and development of touchscreen technology has been fiercely competitive and varied since. The first touchscreen voting machines came into use in the mid-nineties, mostly built by Sequoia. They featured a giant ballot printed on a pressure-sensitive screen, with a small LCD display near the bottom that confirmed the voter’s choice.
More than half of the polling places in the United States now use one of these two types of machine. That percentage increases with every election.