CK-THUNK goes the lever of justice

August 16, 2009 8:06 PM

Can individuals rent voting machines?

I'm a member of a group that is having an important vote in a few weeks. We can do it with pen and paper, but were wondering if we could rent one of those lever voting machines (we're in New York State; they still use them) for more anonymity (and, well, the coolness factor).

I remember using one in high school 15 some-odd years ago for student elections; I don't know if the school owned it outright or not.

Google's not turning up much on the subject.

posted by Lucinda to law & government (5 comments total)

Contact your county board of elections.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:15 PM on August 16

You should also look at wireless keypads; corporate AV companies rent them (often called audience response systems). They're used for unions votes and other big, big meetings. Fully customizable, and you can get detailed reports. For instance you can give a magnetized card to every member, and this card is inserted into the keypad before voting, which makes it very secure and customized.
posted by ddaavviidd at 8:19 PM on August 16

The lever machines, which are awesome, also happen to be extremely old and fragile, and no one makes them (or makes spare parts for them) anymore. So I think you might have a very hard time convincing the BoE to rent one to you, and I doubt you can find any private entity still offering those for sale or rent. (The BoE would probably would be disinclined anyway, for vote security reasons - they might worry that you would tamper with the machine. There may even be laws about the custodianship of voting machines.)

However, these machines are supposed to be replaced, though NY has kept falling behind schedule on this. I don't know where things stand right now, but you could call your county BoE to see if they're decomissioning their old machines. Again, though, these systems are old and unreliable - even if you did succeed in obtaining one, you'd have little guarantee that it would record an accurate vote, since you would probably lack the knowledge (and parts) to ensure that it's in a proper state of repair. Plus, they are big, heavy, and probably difficult to transport.

So, while I give you props for an inspired idea, I think something along the lines of what David has suggested above is probably your best bet.

P.S. Since there's a good chance your school was used as a polling place, perhaps the BoE was persuaded to leave a machine or two behind after election day so that the students could use them as well. Also, BoEs in some states (not sure about NY) do things like voting equipment demonstrations and high school outreach programs to encourage/teach young people how to vote. So maybe your school elections were part of something like that.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:52 PM on August 16

I have a voting booth that I picked up for nothing on eBay. It is awesome and makes voting extra extra fun.
posted by Sheppagus at 12:59 PM on August 17

I called the Board of Elections and they were *very* helpful - they will deliver the booth to where we need it, show someone how to read the results, and pick it up the next day, all at no charge. Yay!
posted by Lucinda at 10:29 AM on August 18