100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN
Monday, June 10, 1918. Now that Saratoga Springs has far more voters than it did last year, the city is urged to start using voting machines to accommodate everyone more efficiently on Election Day.
The city council is skeptical, however, when “a representative of a voting machine company” who goes unidentified in The Saratogian makes the case for his product tonight.
Once people learn to use voting machines, the sales rep claims, more people will be able to vote more quickly than under the old system, in which paper ballots are filled out by hand. Machines would enable the city to reduce the number of voting districts instead of increasing them, as is now planned.
Saratoga Springs currently has thirteen voting districts. That number will increase, probably by two, to make it easier for the women of the Spa City to vote in their first general election. The women of New York State received the right to vote when male voters approved a constitutional amendment last year.
State law requires cities to set up one polling place for every 400 registered voters , but if a city uses voting machines it only needs one polling place for every 600 voters. The voting machine salesman claims that with his devices, the city would be able to reduce its number of voting districts to ten.
While fewer polling places would save the city money, the icost of acquiring voting machines would outweigh any savings. The products offered tonight cost $750 apiece, and sources say that “the present condition of the city treasury does not justify any such expenditure.”
Americanizing Americans
The threat of enemy aliens in wartime and radical ideologies at all times has led many Americans to stress the importance of thoroughly Americanizing immigrants from around the world, but a Saratogian editorial notes that the state of Oklahoma has launched a program for “the Americanization of Americans.
“If it sounds strange at first, just think it over a minute,” the editorial writer suggests, “Before this war the average American had only the haziest – and rosiest impression of American history. Boys and girls received a smattering of education in the schools about the government [and] social problems were left to the specializing college student.
“In other words, Americans took a good deal for granted and went their own many ways without any very definite information about their nation as a whole, living, growing thing. The war has made us face a good many of those things for ourselves [and] it is safe to say that there is room in the general scheme of things for the ‘Americanization of Americans’ idea.”