Back to Basics: Elections Board to Return to Lever Machines for Primaries

This article was written by C. Zawadi Morris.

Less than three years and $95 million after the new electronic voting machines were deployed in New York City, Board of Election officials are planning to return to the old lever voting machines first developed in the 1890s for use in the coming September primary elections in New York City, The New York Times reported. 
Officials are saying that the counting process is too cumbersome with the electronic machines and in an effort to avoid an electoral embarrassment, the city is poised to go back to the drawing board to what they know is tried and true.   

The BOE was criticized most recently for its slowness and inefficiency in determining a winner in the March 2012 special election and also the Congressional primary last June, leading many people to doubt whether they could manage the much higher turnout expected for the mayoral primary, runoff and general elections this year.  

The old machines will be deployed at polling places across the five boroughs definitely for the primaries and most likely also the runoff two weeks later.   

The modern machines, in which voters fill out a paper ballot and feed it into an optical scanner, would return for the general election on Nov. 5 and then all future contests.