Opening the Democracy Box

Abstract

In November 2000, Americans witnessed an extraordinary political spectacle. As is well known, this was not the quick and virtually mechanical process of voting, tabulating, and announcing winners to which the American public had become accustomed. Instead, the presidential vote was so close that it took weeks to produce a result, and generated a raft of lawsuits that subjected numerous aspects of the election procedures to intense public and legal scrutiny. In the end, both victor and defeated were left questioning the system and its legitimacy, and numerous commentators wondered what, if anything, had gone wrong. Was the problem character flaws in the candidates, the litigious nature of American society, the deep divisions within the electorate, or the reliance on an 'antiquated' balloting technology? From a science studies perspective, however, another sort of response might have been proffered: a technology that was supposed to remain invisible the voting punch card with its soon-to-be notorious perforated chads became visible, and a transparency that was supposed to be produced the connection between voter and vote was instead rendered opaque. As methods of counting proliferated and arguments raged back and forth around the relative objectivity and accuracy of machine versus hand counts, it quickly became clear just how much social! political work voting machinery routinely performed. It is not that punch-card counters made no decisions, as some advocates for the objectivity of machines over people argued. Stacks of uncounted (because machine-uncountable) ballots testified to a process of vote tabulation in which machines determined card-by-card which candidates, if any, the voters had chosen. Rather, the delegation of certain tasks to nonhuman agents allowed much of the voting process to be 'black-boxed'.