Where was the 'help' in Help America Vote?

The results are finally known in the last contested races in New York State. The results are also in on voters' reactions to the new voting machines - and they reveal some real and troubling concerns.

I recently did a poll of Long Island voters that found a large majority preferred the old-style lever machines to the new paper-ballot optical scanners. This is to be expected, and it's not just nostalgia for the loss of terms like "pulling the lever" for your candidate or "the sanctity of the secret ballot" once you "enter the voting booth." It's also reasonable for there to be a learning curve with any new technology - particularly when it's replacing a system that had been in place for 80 years and that most felt worked well.

Indeed, the change in the state's voting procedures wasn't made by choice but by the force of the federal government, through the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The law was the federal government's knee-jerk reaction to the contested Bush-Gore presidential election of 2000 - ultimately decided by the Supreme Court 10 years ago this week - and the problems in the Florida voting system.

Of course, New York never used the punch-card "hanging chad" system Florida did, and there were no charges of voter fraud here in 2000. In fact, in eight decades of lever voting in New York, there were remarkably few allegations of widespread fraud, and electoral problems have generally centered on voter intimidation or nonlegal or impostor registrants, rarely on the machines.

An additional rationale for the change was that there needed to be a record for manual recounts and audits. But in an age when we all confidently move our money around through touch-screen electronic machines, are we to seriously to believe we cannot vote electronically with the same level of confidence?

If there is a need for a paper trail, then it is necessitated by problems with the new machines themselves. In the finally-decided Tim Bishop-Randy Altschuler race, for instance, the only Election Day paper that was counted was from a cross section of the machines to validate their accuracy. Other counting focused on absentee ballots.

Ironically, a debacle like what happened in Florida in 2000 could absolutely happen here now. On the lever machines, a registered vote was a vote. But once you get to analyzing paper, lawyers start arguing about a voter's intent based upon how the ballot is marked.

As for voters, the No. 1 complaint in the poll was difficulty reading the small size of the print on the ballot. Magnifiers and readers had to be offered on Election Day to help those of us with aging eyesight. There's an irony here; one of the directives of the Help America Vote Act was to aid those with disabilities in casting their vote. It seems the unintended result was to handicap everybody across the board.

The No. 2 complaint was privacy. Instead of being shielded completely on four sides as before, voters are shielded only on three. When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was voting, the cameras had to be shooed away to a safe distance to ensure they didn't capture an image of Hizzonner's ballot. This is, of course, the same Mayor Bloomberg who described the first implementation of the new voting machines in the September primary as "a royal screw-up" and summed up election night as "We've gone backwards."

Finally, there's the issue of speed and accuracy. Technology should enhance both - but the new system led to the slowest and most inaccurate reporting of election night results in memory. New technology is rarely without glitches. The problems with the new machines can be addressed and corrected, and it's possible that the voters will become completely comfortable with them.

It's even possible that in 80 years, the voters will complain about scrapping them for a new system - if this one can last that long.