Voting To Become More Like High School Exams

After fifty years of service, the city's lever voting machines will be replaced with "SAT-style ovals," according to the Times. When the Board of Elections chooses the city's new voting machines on Tuesday, and it's likely the group will select Scantron-style fill-in-the-blank test forms, which will be in place for the September primary.

Though they're iconic, the current Shoup 3.2 mechanical voting machines can break down, and there's no paper trail left behind in case they act up. That's why officials are leaning towards a standardized-test-style voting process, which they say won't just provide better record keeping, but will also shorten the occasionally lengthy lines at the polls (so long as the Board of Elections keeps enough sharpened #2 pencils on hand). The new procedure would go something like this: Upon signing in, voters will take their ballots to one of several voting stations, "which are like raised desks, with dividers to offer privacy." After making their choices, voters will go to a touch-screen computer, which will show them how to scan their ballots. After being scanned, the paper ballots will fall into locked boxes beneath the machines where they can be checked against the digital results.

New York City will be one of the last municipalities in the country to update its voting protocol — perhaps because some voters are so attached to the old machines. "Most New Yorkers are nostalgic about lever machines. I know I am," said Lawrence D. Norden, director of the Voter Technology Assessment Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. "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."