Remember in A.I. when aliens let Haley Joel Osment hang out with his reincarnated dead mother for a day before she dies again? That’s basically what might happen this September, but Haley Joel Osment is the New York electorate and his dead mom is the old-timey, lever-operated voting booth. For a variety of reasons — basically, there isn’t enough time in between the mayoral primary and the likely runoff two weeks later — the city’s Board of Elections wants to bring back the voting booths that so delighted New Yorkers until they were retired in 2010 in favor of the new optical-scan machines, which apparently take longer to count votes, somehow. If the plan is approved by the legislature, the booths would only be used in the mayoral primary and runoff, and then retired forever, again, probably.
