Here's a piece of an interesting "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" episode that originally aired April 4, 1974. Fred Rogers visits the workshop of a friend in the neighborhood (Bob Trow) who happened to be doing maintenance on a lever voting machine. Here's the video (and a little more below the fold):
As you can see, things were a lot different regarding the mechanics of voting then. First, a voting booth required a lot more space--this is no small machine. Second, there were a lot of moving mechanical parts, and thus the reliability wasn't all that superb (not that more modern computerized voting machines were necessarily that great either). Third, there's no paper trail--you simply have an ostensibly-locked tabulator in the back of the machine.
Actually, that wasn't new technology at all back in the 1970s...lever voting machines had been around since the 1890s (of course, they weren't electric then).
I find it fascinating that Mr. Rogers mentioned that you're only supposed to spend 3 minutes in the voting machine. Looks like (based on that machine) that there were a lot of down-ticket races (for example, they voted for the coroner!!!). (Note that Mr. Rogers was recorded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.)
By the way, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe (always done very creatively, thanks to the genius of Fred Rogers) had a skit that episode where they voted on whether or not to add "Fairchilde" to the name of the territory that they were in (after the eccentric and power-hungry Lady Elaine Fairchilde). According to tv.com, the vote failed by a large margin.
http://www.tv.com/...
Neither Fred Rogers nor Bob Trow are with us anymore (Fred died in 2003 of cancer, and Bob died in 1998 of a heart attack). They were both of the same generation (born 1928 and 1926, respectively).