The Voting Technology Archive is a special archival collection on the technological issues raised by the year 2000 US presidential election. The archive contains electronic and paper documents, as well as material artifacts, such as a voting machine used in Palm Beach, Florida in 2000. The archive aims to preserve ephemeral and rare materials not readily available from other sources for scholarly research. The archive resulted from a collaborative project of the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation.

Overview

The stunningly close vote in the 2000 presidential election produced an unprecedented public display of the machinery for casting and counting votes. Intense public scrutiny of the voting process showed that this machinery is not a simple unproblematic instrument for objectively registering the popular will but a large sociotechnical system, involving a complex mix of humans, machines, institutions, and procedures. The Voting Technology Archive documents the debate about the performance of counting machines, voters, election officials, ballots, courts, and other components of voting systems in the 2000 presidential election.

The archive is housed in a special collection at the Cornell University Libraries. It is designed to facilitate in-depth scholarly work in a wide range of disciplines, including political science, history, law, and science and technology studies. Scholars, now and in the future, will be able to use the collection not only to examine the linked political, epistemological, mechanical, and ethical aspects of US voting systems, but also to explore how Americans imagined their representative democracy at the turn of the century.

Six Archive Themes are emphasized in the collection. The collection focuses on the 2000 presidential election. However, some additional material was collected on the controversy about electronic voting and the 2004 presidential election.