John McTammany (c. 1845–1915) was a Scottish-born American inventor who is credited with a number of patents. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager and served in the American Civil War.Encyclopedia.com:The 1910s: Science and Technology: Deaths
From 1880 through 1892, he focused on automatic player piano mechanisms, the free reed organette.The Pianola Institute:History of the Pianola:Inventors
After 1892, McTammany's focus shifted to voting machines and automatic vote tabulators. His first voting patent was for a "pneumatic registering ballot box" that counted individual punched-card ballots as they were deposited in a ballot box, with a pneumatic mechanism very similar to the pneumatic mechanisms used in player pianos.John McTammany, Pneumatic Registering Ballot Box, , granted Sept. 13, 1892. This machine was comparable in its intended use to a precinct-count optical scan voting system. Some have described this the first voting machine based on perforations of paper.MIT Inventor of the Week: Player Piano: John McTammany, October 2001. This is not the case; Kennedy Dougan patented a punched card voting system in 1890.Kennedy Dougan, Ballot Holder, , granted Nov. 11, 1890.Kennedy Dougan, Mechanical Ballot and Ballot Holder, , granted Nov. 11, 1890. It appears likely that McTammany's machine could tabulate votes recorded using Dougan's ballot punch.
McTammany's later voting machines and vote tabulators recorded votes on rolls of paper much like a player piano roll instead of having a separate ballot for each voter. His first efforts in this direction involved marking the vote recording roll with a pencil and then hand counting the tick marks.John McTammany, Balloting Device, , granted Aug. 8, 1893. Within a month, he filed a patent for an improved machine with push-button punches by each candidate's name,John McTammany, Vote Recording Machine, , granted Aug. 8, 1893. He patented several alternatives for supporting large numbers of candidates and offices.John McTammany, Voting Machine, , granted Sept. 10, 1895.John McTammany, Voting Machine, , granted Nov. 19, 1895. Votes cast on all of his punched machines could be tabulated on a pneumatic tabulator.John McTammany, Pneumatic Vote Counting Machine, , granted Nov. 19, 1895.
In 1897, McTammany filed a patent for a method of detecting overvotes during the tabulation of player-piano-roll voting records,John McTammany, Apparatus for Detecting Fraudulent or Improper Votes, , granted June. 7, 1904. along with an improved vote tabulator.John McTammany, Vote-Counting Machine, , granted Jan. 12, 1904.
In their mature form, McTammany voting machines were used in a number of jurisdictions in the United States. McTammany received legislative approval for limited use of his machines in Massachusetts in 1893, but it was not until 1896 that his machines saw widespread use in that state. Connecticut approved use of the McTammany machine in 1895.An Act to Provide for the Use of the McTammany Voting Machine in Municipal Elections, Chapter CCCXXXV, Public Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut in the Year 1895, Case Lockwood and Brainard, Hartford, 1895; page 694. In Rhode Island, the question of whether a vote on the McTammany machine met the legal definition of a ballot went all the way to the state supreme court in 1895.Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, CSLI Publications, 2012; see Section 2.6, pages 26-27.
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