Some may have noticed that results on election night seemed to be coming in more quickly from other counties than in Nassau. Suffolk county was using similar optical-scan machines to Nassau, but added a step: According to Jesse Garcia, who works for the Suffolk County Board of Elections, poll inspectors in Suffolk would close down the machines and then run a tape with the results from each machine. They would call these results into the Board of Elections headquarters, where they would be transcribed by workers and then manually entered into the county’s system. In this way, Suffolk was able to more quickly post the unofficial results from its 1,047 election districts.

The lever machines were an analogue system, much different from the new electronic system. When someone pushed down the lever to vote, it would rotate a tumbler in the back of the machine which kept track of the number of times that lever was depressed. When the polls closed, election works would open up the machine and write down all the vote tallies. These were then transported to the Department of Elections the same way the new flash drives are.

Election works would then manually type in the results from each machine, as opposed to plugging the flash drive into computers.

“If you think about it, that’s the total statement on the indictment of the system,” said Biamonte. “You turn around and you have this electronic voting system that’s going to cost you tens of millions of dollars, and it works more slowly and less reliably than a system that used pen and paper and keypunching.”

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