New York City Wants To Revive Old Voting Machines 211
McGruber writes "The NY Times reports, '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, New York 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."
Lever machines just work (Score:5, Insightful)
And do not need to be replaced.
OK we're all done here.
Re:Even simpler, #2 pencils and a scanning tool (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all we use in Canada for every election at every level. It works fine. You have 100% paper trail, electronic tallying speed, no "hanging chaff" nonsense. It's a tried and true technology that has been around for decades and decades and decades. I don't know why the US goofs around with these other systems, other then PORK PORK PORK PORK PORK
Re:and some can see leaning up and work on who you (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it was back in the old Chicago days
Given the recent IRS shenanigans, I think we have the new Chicago days now.
Re:How Much You Wanna Bet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's the anti-union? I'm seeing "Experienced union guy utilizes foresight and keeps the old equipment in storage, ready to counter the impending disaster caused Management's latest bright idea". Seems rather pro-union from where I'm sitting.
Re:Even simpler, #2 pencils and a scanning tool (Score:0, Insightful)
The punch ballots that were a problem in 2000 were working fine for years; it was only that particular election where they suddenly become "flawed".
Some independent investigators tried to reproduce the "hanging chad" or "dimpled" ballots and could not no matter how hard they tried. The paper on those ballots is not very tough and the punch tool given is readily capable of punching a hole into the paper with very minimal effort.
One investigator finally reproduced the problems. You know what it took to reproduce the problem? Trying to punch through a stack of multiple ballots. The ballots near the bottom were not punched all the way through and often had either dimples or hanging chads.
Florida in 2000 was an orchestrated effort by Democrats to rig the election for Gore.
So the solution was to, rather than investigate the fraud, replace all of these machines *nationwide* with closed-source and unverifiable Diebold voting machines where the Diebold CEO was on record in saying that his company would help deliver the election to Republicans. Hilarious.