On March 29, 1969 over 4,500 Seattle residents went to the polls to elect the 16-member Central Area School Council. This was the first community council elected to help the Seattle School Board run an attendance area’s schools. It was also the city’s first computer-assisted election, and it used IBM Votomatic machines, on loan from Clark County, WA. After the polls closed, punch-card ballots were taken to a counting center and tallied by a computer.

Here, 10-year old Marsha Watters, a student at Madrona Elementary School, holds one of the Votomatic machines from Vancouver to be used in the school council election. Catharine Links (right) demonstrates how to punch the ballot card.

Caption information source: The Seattle Times: March 23, 1969, p. 45; March 27, 1969, p. 12.
Caption information also derived from captions written by Post-Intelligencer staff and attached to the back of the photograph.