NYC finds a New Use for their Mechanical Voting Machines

When New York City changed to optical scan voting systems, they put their old mechanical voting machines into storage.


Some were sold for their parts, many voters have asked for them to be used again, but the New York City Board of Elections have found a new use for them.


The old voting machines could be coming back to life, in the form of new kiosks to speed up the vote counting process.

The Board of Elections unveiled a prototype kiosk that would be outfitted with screens and a USB drive that can transmit data from memory sticks from each voting site within minutes.

The current system requires the USB drives to be taken to police precincts, then using secured laptops, sent to AP, who releases the preliminary counts to the public.

"Running the sticks out to the precincts takes a lot longer. They have to box them up, send them to the precinct. Someone has to take it out, read it, transmit to AP, package it up again and send it to the Board of Elections. This, basically, all you have to do is walk across the room," said John Naudus, the director of the Electronic Voting System Department. "So 9 o'clock, polls close, hopefully by 9:30 they're walking in front of this machine with a stick in their hand and they're sending us results."

The project comes at a cost of $15 million and funding would need to come from the New York City Council. The Board of Election is hoping for a trial run in 2014.

Sending vote counts over the internet or airwaves is a major security issue. Another problem is the possibility the uploads from the different polling sites are lost when the receiving site system can not handle the incoming flow. And last, miss reads of the sticks and zero sized files or corrupt files would then be transmitted.

Let me know what type of problems you find with this system.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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