Voters should not expect to pull a lever in voting booths on Nov. 2.
New machines are replacing the old ones. And now voters will fill in circles on ballots, which will be digitally counted.
Residents who voted in the primary were able to give the new machines a test-drive on Sept. 14. The machines got mixed reviews, with some problems noted across the county.
“Not having to manually press buttons and levers made this feel like a different experience,” said Howard Dinowitz of Syracuse, who voted at Bird Library.
In 2009, only about 40 percent of voters in Onondaga County used digital voting machines. The rest of the voting sites in the county switched over to comply with federal law. The law, called Help America Vote Act, was enacted in response to the 36-day recount in Florida during the 2000 election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush. The Supreme Court eventually stopped the recount and Bush became president. The voting-machine law standardizes the way voting is conducted across the country to use digitally counted ballots.
With the new machines, voters get a paper ballot to fill in the circle that corresponds to their choice of candidates. Voters then feed their paper ballots through an electronic scanner that counts the votes.
By 4 p.m. on primary day, Sept. 14, the Republican elections commissioner, Helen Kiggins, told The Post-Standard that some election sites had some technical malfunctions and were running short on ballots and black pens. The technical problems included machine jams and ballots not being cut properly to fit into the digital machine.
If problems occurred with the new ballots, voters filled out absentee ballots, which were counted manually after the polls closed. But this process did not sit well with some voters.
“I did not like having to fill out an absentee ballot. They could forget to count it or not include it in the vote at all,” said Michael Blake of Syracuse, who voted at Bird Library.
With turnout higher than anticipated, ballots and pens also ran out quickly. On The Post-Standard’s Web site, http://www.syracuse.com , Commissioner Kiggins suggested that voters bring their own pens to the polls.
“Tell them to bring a black pen with them,” she told the newspaper. “Our techs are out buying black-ink gel pens and dropping them off boxes of them at polling places.”
Lindsey Lerman, a junior communications and rhetorical studies major at Syracuse University who voted at Bird Library, did not see that announcement before heading to the polls. “I did not know to bring a black pen with me. They were all out of pens when I got there so I had to wait about 15 minutes until more pens arrived,” she said.
Others voters had better luck. Anne Goldstein of Syracuse voted at Bird Library. For her, she said, “It went very smoothly. It was very quick and efficient.”
(Hilary Levin is a senior majoring in broadcast journalism.)
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