NYC To Vote Via Optical Scan Ballots

This fall NYC will become one of the last places in the country to finally update to a non-mechanical voting system.

After years of delays and missteps, the city’s Board of Elections is expected to choose new electronic voting machines on Tuesday that will be rolled out in time for the September primary. In so doing, New York City will become one of the last places in the country to get rid of its lever-operated voting machines. The change will improve the way votes are counted, providing a paper trail backup for each vote, and make lines at the polls move faster, according to the Board of Elections. But it will also end another urban ritual, as tactile intimacy gives way to modern efficiency.

“In the context of the history of voting in New York, the shift away from lever machines is a huge milestone,” said Lawrence D. Norden, director of the Voter Technology Assessment Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. “Most New Yorkers are nostalgic about lever machines. I know I am. Ask a New Yorker about those machines and they will tell you that there is something reassuring about pulling the lever and hearing the choices register on the machine.”

Count me among those who will miss the old machines, as clunky and often-broken as they were. There was something really dramatic about yanking that giant metal lever and hearing that satisfying fwuuunck as you pretended you were opening a trapdoor under the feet of the person you had just voted against. Or was that just me who did that?