Reply #10: Yes, all of that. [View All]

[noamnety]

"No one is making new parts for these dinosaurian devices anymore, they are hard for disabled people to use and their error rate can be embarrassingly exposed in close elections, as happened two years ago, when State Senator Nicholas Spano of Yonkers saw his narrow election-night lead shrink drastically when the machines were merely double-checked. Officials with the federal Election Assistance Commission recently acknowledged a little-known flaw with lever machines: if they are dropped, that can make the vote tallies change. There have also been reports of a strange tendency of vote totals in lever machines to end in 99, as if their weary dials could not quite make the turn to 000."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/opinion/LI_Suffolk.html

Better than anything electronic, I suppose ... but not accurate, all the same.