On July 31, Connecticut’s Secretary of State announced that no mechanical “lever” voting machines will be used anywhere in the state in the future. This leaves New York as the only state which still expects to use mechanical “lever” voting machines in the future. The old mechanical machines have been rejected because they don’t leave an audit paper trail and because some voters with particular disabilities cannot use them.
Mechanical voting machines have been harmful to minor parties and independent candidates, for decades. It is extremely difficult to cast a write-in, with that type of machine. Also, use of mechanical voting machines encourages elections officials to use party column or party row ballots. By contrast, the optical-scan ballots that will replace the Connecticut machines have a friendlier format. Each office is presented as a separate item. This encourages the voter to make an independent choice, as he or she goes from office to office. This, in turn, makes it easier for minor parties to poll a large vote for the less important offices, because people don’t usually care very much which party wins an office like State Treasurer or Auditor.
A final disadvantage for minor parties with “lever” machines has been the tendency for minor party votes not to get reported at all. This is not because of mechanical failure, but the older versions required human beings (after the polls have closed) to examine the back of the machine and manually record the number of votes for each candidate. Over decades, there have been many documented instances when the human beings reading the counters in the back of the machine simply didn’t bother to record the numbers for minor party candidates, sometimes because of the “reason” that their votes were so few anyway, it wasn’t worth bothering to record them.
