Why Tuesday?

Get Involved

NYC: Goodbye, Lever Voting

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Lever Machine

In May, we brought you the story of how New York State was atwitter – in reality and online – about how best to ditch a vestigial organ of elections past: the lever voting machine. Today New York City is finally doing it, and not without further debate, David W. Chen reports this morning for the New York Times.

After years of delays and fierce lobbying, the city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday afternoon selected Election Systems and Software, an Omaha company, to provide new electronic voting machines in time for the September 2010 primary.

Voters will now be required to fill out paper ballots with ovals, similar to SAT exams, before feeding them into a fax-like scanner.

The change means that New York City will finally be in compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. That law was passed to avoid a repeat of the recount debacle in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, and to help disabled people vote.

For more on the switch, read the complete story here.

You can watch me watching others attempt to use the machines that led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 in this vlog. Hope you have a laugh.

Photo of NY lever voting machine via the schneider clan on Flickr.

Comments are closed.

About Us

Why Tuesday? is a non-partisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2005 to find solutions to increase voter turnout and participation in elections... More

The Answer

In 1845, before Florida, California, and Texas were states or slavery had been abolished, Congress needed to pick a time for Americans to vote... More

Recent Blog Posts

Recent Comments

Valuable information. Fortunate me I discovered your site accidentally, and I am shocked why this accident did not came about earlier! I bookmarked it.

Posted by cars on blog post Why Do We Vote On Tuesday?

There is no doubt in my mind that there would be higher voter turnout on Saturday than Tuesday. Most people work on Tuesday, and getting to the polls (usually before or after work) and often standing in long lines can be a time-consuming hassle...

Posted by henry swedlaw on blog post Why Do We Vote On Tuesday?