NY Times: A Love Affair With Lever Voting Machines [View All]

[Wilms]

A Love Affair With Lever Voting Machines

March 10, 2009

By Jennifer 8. Lee

As skepticism grows over computerized voting systems nationwide, a growing push is emerging in New York State to keep the once-disdained lever voting machines around. The proponents argue that given the financial crisis, now is not the time to be spending millions of dollars on upgrading decades-old machines that are actually more reliable than the new systems out there.

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The push comes now in large part because accessible machines for impaired voters were installed at each poll site for the 2008 election. Lever proponents argue that these new machines bring New York into compliance with the federal voting reform legislation, passed after the 2000 recount debacle, which is called the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The machines, despite their aged technology and flaws, are more transparent and reliable than the so-called black box systems, their proponents argue. (Others have a different opinion.) Lever machines work by incrementing counters in the back each time a voter pulls the lever. At the end of the day, the machines are opened in public and the counts are tallied, though some people criticize this as being opaque and lacking a paper trail).

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Now, given all the problems that have emerged in other states, local election officials are publicly relieved that they have not wasted tens of millions of dollars in installing systems that just had to be uninstalled. However, New York’s Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (which is more strict than the federal legislation) would seem to ban lever voting machines because they do not create a paper audit trail (as opposed to the entire voting site having an audit trail).

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Proponents of the lever machines — and there are many — say they should not be underestimated. Despite being described as obsolete, the century-old technology may be equal and perhaps superior to today’s best voting systems, argues Bryan Pfaffenberger, a professor at the University of Virginia, who is currently writing a book on the history of lever machines. “I really think its an astonishing achievement,” he said. They have 28,000 moving parts and can be adapted to the myriad sorts of American elections (including, for example, picking multiple candidates for a school board). “They were designed so they could operate under punishing conditions and operate reliably,” he said, “and that they could be serviced by technicians of modest background.”

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http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/a-love-affair-with-lever-voting-machines/