On Thursday, the New York State Legislature (House and Senate), passed a bill that allows New York City to use lever voting machines for the 2013 Primary and Runoff.
The bill also moves the date of a possible runoff election from September 24 to October 1.
The New York City Board of Elections had called for the return of the lever machines because they claimed there would be no time to reprogram the optical scanners for a possible runoff.
Of all the races, the Democratic Mayoral race with seven candidates, could require the runoff, as no candidate could get the 40% to win the primary.
The New York City Board of Election Day Operations will have to request for the Commissioners’ authorization to spend one (1) day training the poll workers in the Train the Trainer Classes on the lever machines using the 2009 Poll Worker Procedures. There have been no changes to the lever machines since 2009. A consultant is currently assisting the Board revising the poll worker exams and poll worker curriculum. Monitors will be using hard copy reports because the Tablet App is currently designed for the electronic voting systems and there is not enough time to redesign and reprogram the Tablets.
But using lever machines brings many legal problems like: No required paper trail, not ADA compliant, not HAVA or state approved, and not able to display all the new approved New York City languages. There is also the need to get the run-off ballots to overseas and military voters. And finally, many of the lever machines in storage need mechanical repair that will require the expense of cannibalizing machines for parts and finding technicians who know how to fix them and a printer who knows how to print lever ballots.
We will have to wait to see who gets a restraining order so the courts can determine if this bill is constitutional.
What do you think?
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!
Michael H. Drucker
Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us 
No comments:
Post a Comment