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New ballot scanners set for elections
Trial runs this year in eight city districts, town of Princetown
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
By Kathleen Moore (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

SCHENECTADY COUNTY — This time it’s for real.
This September, thousands of city residents will finally use the new voting machines that were supposed to replace the lever machines at least five years ago.
Election Commissioner Brian Quail said the new machines will be used at Schenectady High School, the polling place for eight city districts.
The machines will also be used by both election districts in Princetown. In total, 6,672 voters could use the machines this fall for the primary and general elections.
Next year, everyone else will switch to the new machines, called DS-200 scanners.
In essence, New York is switching from lever machines to no machine at all. When voters sign in at their polling place, they will be handed a paper ballot and ushered to a curtained booth. Inside, they will fill in the circle next to their choices and then slide their ballot into an opaque sleeve. Then they’ll stand in line at an optical scanner and feed their ballot into the machine, which will count every vote. The ballots will be sucked into a locked box under the scanner.
The machine will also notify voters if they over-vote or under-vote and ask them whether they want to submit the ballot or change it.
Although the machine will count the ballots, just as the lever machines did, the state will require Schenectady to audit the results at first, the county election commissioners said. They will physically count a certain number of paper ballots to ensure that the machine count is correct.
That’s an improvement over the current system, the commissioners said, noting that the lever machines do not create a paper ballot for each vote.........>>>>.............>>>>.............http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/jul/22/0722_votingmachines/