From the Gotham Gazette:If all goes according to plan, New York City will have new voting machines this year. After years of delays, New York is making progress toward complying with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which required states to update their voting systems in the aftermath of Florida's 2000 election debacle. New York is the last state to comply with the federal legislation and plans to have new machines in place by this year's primary elections. Questions about how the city selected its machines though, could create more delays and confusion in the months leading up to the September election.
Voters across the state, including in New York City, almost certainly will bid farewell to our decades-old Shoup lever machines. The New York City Board of Elections voted this month to purchase optical-scan voting machines from Elections Systems & Software. The city's contract, the largest for voting machines of all the counties in New York, is worth $60 million to $70 million, according to a spokesperson for the Board of Elections.
The new machines, the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) DS200 optical scanner, will read and tabulate paper ballots cast by voters on Election Day. The machines will be used in conjunction with the company's ES&S AutoMark ballot marking devices, which the city purchased last year to be placed in every poll site. The ballot marking devices allow all voters, including those with disabilities, to mark a paper ballot independently by using the machine's touch screen and accessibility functions, like a Braille keypad or audio recordings of the ballot for those with visibility impairments. The city placed devices in every poll site in 2009. Under the new system, optical scan machines will scan and count ballots filled out using the marking devices ballots marked by as well as those cast using pen.
13 comments:
they are rigged to elect H.R.Clinton and lib/dems.
It looks like a trash can, maybe that's where it belongs?
How do we know they're rigged for Clinton? Couldn't they be rigged for Bloomberg?
Perhaps they're non-denominational, and can simply be rigged by whoever has the power or money to do so. You have to look on the bright side.
Hey it about time - it should be interesting to see what the life expectancy is of these machines.
It also like like a laptop built on to a portable box. Instead of it costing 3K it probably set us back 25K!
It can't be rigged for Bloomberg, his friend Haggerty was representing the company that lost out on the bidding. Had they won, that's a different story!
What a joke. The only real reform needed at the polls is to give the inspectors the right to ask for valid, government issued photo ID.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
- Stalin
Most people over 60 wont know how to use things.
I doubt they will get on the "soup line" at some local school for instruction.
These lib-dem SOB's are really locking themselves in like they did in California
These machines can be programmed the same way slots are "adjusted" in Atlantic city and Vegas.
All it would take is one person with a laptop in the back of the delivery van.
Tally the votes then do a hard reboot to overwrite the tweak.
No paper trails, no evidence.
Bloomberg made his billions developing software and hardware.
I have one of his keyboards with the built in speakers, sliding fader and microphone
That thing appears to be a Panasonic Tuffbook with the Keyboard swapped out
Can we go back to back to boxes and slips of paper? It can't fail!
Are these the ones with the paper ballot fed into the machine like other states have with a paper trail? If its touch screen and paper ballot thats questionable. Other states have similar optical scanner machines and they assist people with disabilities on their paper ballots they feed into the machine.
Those pull lever machines are complete junk from fifty years ago. The last four times with local elections Ive witnessed countless people having to do it over because the clunker machine is falling apart.
It is about time NY entered the modern age and used the same paper ballots (scanned by optical machines, like an SAT) that the rest of the country does.
I thought it was a joke when I went to vote last fall (my first election in the city) and was greeted by an massive old machine that I'd only ever read about in history books.
Also, these new paper ballot scanning machines make it much easier to write-in a candidate -- which is a cumbersome process with NYC's current mechanical devices.
It was almost impossible to write-in a candidate with the old voting machines. You had to take a pencil, and write in a really tiny font in the tiny box provided.
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