“We just had the most competitive election in Nassau County history, where the county executive was elected by a margin of 383 votes, and no one’s disputing that,” Biamonte said. “It took us five weeks to go through 8,000 paper ballots — absentees, affidavits and emergency ballots. If we used this system last year, we would have had 260,000 paper ballots to go through.”

The new machines will most likely be in use by the time primaries are held in September. But officials are concerned about how the public will react, and question the reasoning behind spending millions of dollars to fix a system they feel was not broken to begin with.

“At a time when every municipality in this country is running record deficits, [and] real serious services like public safety and services that people need are being cut or adjusted, why are we spending all this money to fix what? To accomplish what?” Biamonte said. “We’re very concerned — we think this is an absolutely unnecessary thing to be doing, and it serves no purpose. It accomplishes nothing.”