Counties have 5 voting machines to pick among
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- February
- 7
Judge Kimberly O’Connor ruled that two makers of optical-scan machines who had been removed from consideration last week by the state Board of Elections should be restored.
So the lineup now in the confusing saga is three varieties of the optical-scan devices, which use paper ballots that are then read electronically, and two brands of ATM-style machines.
Late today the League of Women Voters sent out a letter to county election officials urging them to pick an optical-scan machine, since, according to the league, the ATM-style touch machines might not meet federal standards.
It remains to be seen what the counties decide to do tomorrow.
New York is the only state that has yet to conform to the federal Help America Vote Act, a law passed in the wake of the Florida election debacle in 2000 designed to improve the voting process around the country.
The state is under a federal court order to comply by tomorrow.
Partisan wrangling on the Board of Elections and high-stakes lobbying have featured the long-running drama over the selection of machines, which could be worth millions to the winning bidder.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm by Jay Gallagher.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
