NY had reliable lever machines with mechanical counters until after the 2000 elections when the democrats wanted a system they could use to cheat and create problems they could use to their advantage. Optical Ballot scanners are not all that reliable even when they are working. If you run the ballots through multiple times then you will get slightly different counts. They are far better than the totally electronic touch screens which have even more issues, and are child’s play to cheat with.
They found plenty of ways to cheat with the mechanical machines. Machines would appear at a polling site with many Dem votes already on them. Or the levers wouldn’t work, meaning that paper ballots had to be tallied at the end of the voting day, with three Dems hogging them so the Republican can’t even see what’s going on as they fill in the numbers. Happened to me when I was a poll watcher.
The polling site chairman kept going into a supposedly locked voting machine and pulling the lever (for Carl McCall) and then saying nope, it’s still not working. I told him if he went inside that booth one more time I was calling the cops. The only way I could get him to stop.
Also they told us in training that no one should be allowed to eat lunch behind a machine. You think, Oh, come on, but yes people tried to do it. There’s a way you can manipulate the machine from the back if you know how to do it. I made them stop. I was their worst nightmare. They said, “You going to call your lords and masters?” Like all Republicans are Nazis.