New York City Wants to Revive Old Voting Machines
By THOMAS KAPLAN
New York City has spent $95 million over the past few years to bring its election process into the 21st century, replacing its hulking lever voting machines with electronic scanners.
But now, less than three years after the new machines were deployed, election officials say the counting process with the machines is too cumbersome to use them for the mayoral primary this year, and then for the runoff that seems increasingly likely to follow as soon as two weeks later.
In a last-ditch effort to avoid an electoral embarrassment, the city is poised to go back in time: it is seeking to redeploy lever machines, a technology first developed in the 1890s, for use this September at polling places across the five boroughs. The city’s fleet of lever machines was acquired in the 1960s and has been preserved in two warehouses in Brooklyn, shielded from dust by plastic covers.
“We are right between the rock and the hard place, or, if you’re a literary type, between Scylla and Charybdis,” said Frederic M. Umane, the president of the city’s Board of Elections. “It’s the best solution that we’ve been able to come up with.”
Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/nyregion/new-york-city-wants-to-revive-old-voting-machines.html?pagewanted=all
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