You may be voting on a brand new type of voting machine soon – if your county decides to buy them.
On Wednesday, after a lengthy and somewhat contentious meeting, the New York State Board of Elections voted to certify the ExpressVote XL Universal Voting System.
It’s a touch-screen system that will display the entire ballot on a 32-inch screen. One of its selling points is that the system eliminates the need for interpretation of a voter’s intent, which we have seen frequently in New York.
But the new technology has several critics. Cybersecurity election experts have panned the touch-screen technology, and some states that had switched to touch screen, have now switched back to voter-marked paper ballots.
Additionally, Susan Lerner, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause, told Capital Tonight that New York already has the best kind of voting machines there are: voter marked paper ballots read by scanners.
Common Cause is also concerned that the ExpressVote XL uses Windows 10, which may become less secure as Microsoft is planning to end software updates for the operating system in two years time.