New York is the last state in the nation to comply with the '02 Help America Vote Act, mandating that states update their voting machinery. And NY is being sued by the Justice Department over it. The Bush administration wishes to ensure that every citizen has the right to vote for a Republican whether they actually do or not, you see.
In NY the state, displaying its usual courage and efficiency, punted the issue of what machinery to choose to localities, who are dithering. But never fear; local NY governments are nothing if not watchwords for integrity and civic-mindedness.
Anyway, according to the NYT , the struggle is between touch-screen and optical scan machines. The Brennan Center says that the optical scans have the edge, if accuracy is the actual yardstick, which it is not, necessarily. I'm too tired to summarize the article, but the upshot is that poorer voters do better with the optical scan devices.
So we'll see...
On a wider level, the biggest, sickest joke of the "Help America Vote" nonsense is that we still allow partisan control of the electoral process, as in the hideous cases of Harris in '00 and Blackwell in '04. Why the US should consider itself a modern democracy, and preen as such on the international stage, while permitting such travesties, is simply nauseating.