New York City is finally embracing modern voting technology, and all it took was getting sued by the Justice Department. In time for the September primaries, those lever-operated voting booths that we’ve been using for a hundred years will be replaced by optical scan machines. The reason? Despite the unexplainable sense of satisfaction that comes with pulling a large lever, the booths don’t leave a paper trail and are prone to malfunctioning. With the new ballots, voters will simply have to fill in a small bubble for the candidates of their choice (reminiscent of the SATs), walk to a scanning machine, follow the instructions for scanning the ballot, and then answer a series of questions on a computer screen to ensure that their vote was recorded accurately. The upside is that each paper ballot will be saved in a locked box in the event of a recount; the downside is that your grandmother is no longer capable of voting.
