by Gregory Heller

Students may have noticed big brown and steely gray machines being rolled into NYU buildings over the last few days. Yesterday they may have noticed non students entering these buildings and queuing up for their turn behind a curtain to exercise their democratic right to vote. What these students did not see, unless they also tried to exercise their rights, was that many machines malfunctioned on the one day a year they are called into service. The worst case was in Queens where 100 machines would not let voters vote for Chuck Schumer or Eliot Spitzer.

Voting machine malfunctions are not so much isolated cases, but a systemic problem in the Board of Elections. Every year on election day, voting machines are unsealed only to discover that they are not in working order. Not only does this situation cause a logistical nightmare in counting paper ballots, but it also contributes to wide scale voter apathy and low voter turn-out. The Board of Elections should launch a capital campaign to modernize its voting machines and, in doing so, reenergize voter participation for the new millenium.