Old Voting Booth On Display in Tyler

TYLER – Those who are voting early in downtown Tyler are getting a glimpse into history. Two historic voting booths were recently uncovered in storage. One is on display in the Smith County Elections Office lobby on East Ferguson. The Smith County Commissioners Court could vote to donate the other to the Smith County Historical Society. The Douglas Manufacturing Corp. steel collapsible voting booths with red, white and blue canvas curtains were invented in 1906 by Elizabeth Douglas in Nebraska. When Smith County began using the punch card voting systems, in 1978, they used the Douglas Manufacturing booths. They were in use in Smith County until the mid 1980s.

The concept of voting booths at the time came from the introduction of the Australian balloting system and employed wooden booths. Because of the waste and amount of labor involved in building, then dismantling them, demand for a lightweight, collapsible, reusable booth that could be quickly reassembled by unskilled labor was obvious, according to a March 2016 article by the Lincoln Journal Star. Down the road they switched from using steel to using aluminum. Some had as many as five stalls per unit. The company closed last December after its owners decided to retire.