If you’re headed to the polls for this year’s midterm election, remember to utter a silent ‘thank you’ to those who, thanks to the wonders of technology, have made voting as easy as pushing a button.

Voting in the United States has been around since the country’s founding, but before that, our ancestors voted in a variety of different ways stretching back to the age of antiquity. The first voters cast their vote by voice. The process, called “viva voce,” involved simply standing in front of election officials and telling them the candidate for whom you were voting. But the privacy that would come to be so valued throughout the voting process in the coming centuries wasn’t yet in place, so when you cast your vote, you could be standing in front of an audience. Certainly, depending on your loyalties, it could create an awkward situation with your neighbor at the open-air market in the days that would follow.

Still, voice voting was used until well into the 19th century, when we began using paper ballots (Ohio and Kentucky were the last holdouts, allowing voters to vote by voice until 1870). These paper ballots made voting move faster; around the same time, election officials in Australia improved upon those paper ballots by allowing those registered to vote privately. Once finished with one’s ballot, the voter would fold it in half and drop it into a ballot box, and after polls closed, several brave and patient election officials would count them by hand.

Mechanical voting machines came about thanks to the Industrial Revolution, when a New Yorker invented the first one in 1889. The Myers Automatic Voting Booth allowed voters to enter the booth, where they would view color-coded columns that represented each political party, as well as each candidate’s name. The voter would turn a knob at the base of the column representing their choice, and their vote would be recorded and counted by dials installed on the reverse side of the machine.