It is likely more problems would have emerged had there been more hotly contested races or a high voter turnout. Lopsided elections and voter apathy are not much of a strategy for averting Election Day disasters.

But now there's some good news for voters who are ready to bring down the plastic curtain.As a result of a new law just passed by Congress, this should be the last major election in which we will have to deal with these relics from another age. There is a provision in the law that is especially pertinent to New York: It provides $325 million to replace not just Florida's notorious punch-card ballot machines, but New York's own notorious lever machines.

The biggest problem with the lever machines is that they constantly break. While the Board of Elections claims these machines have become more reliable in recent years, more than 6.5 percent of them broke down in the 2000 election. Although there were improvements in 2001 (in part because of lower turnout in an off-year election), there were a large number of breakdowns again.

Exacerbating the problem, these mechanical machines were bought in 1962 and have not been manufactured in more than 30 years. (In fact, they are based on a machine first designed by Thomas Edison in 1869 to record votes in Congress - it was his first patent). Replacement parts must be recycled from machines in other parts of the country. There is also a continual shortage of technicians capable of repairing the machines. And each time a machine breaks down, the voting lines become longer, in some cases making it extremely difficult for people to vote.

Although the Board of Elections has recently been buying additional surplus machines, there has also been a continual shortage of machines. According to a Century Foundation report, in the 2000 elections, the City Board of Elections used 641 fewer voting machines than required by state law. In 2001, Manhattan was about 113 machines short of the 1,659 it needed to fully comply with the law; Queens was about 111 short of the 1,908 it needed; and Brooklyn was about 143 short.

In part because of the problems these machines cause, New York City had more uncounted, unmarked and lost votes than did Florida-and the nation as a whole-in the 2000 elections. The average lost-vote rate in the 2000 elections for New York City was 3.9 percent - an estimated 60,000 New York voters did not have their votes for president recorded. This was significantly higher than the national average of 2 percent and Florida's 2.9 percent.

Equally unacceptable is the fact that the lever machines are not accessible to the disabled. Most of them cannot be used by people in wheelchairs or the blind, forcing these citizens to cast their vote either by absentee ballot or with the assistance of a poll worker or other designee (130,000 New Yorkers are legally blind).

In addition, while the new law requires all voting systems to provide alternative language accessibility, New York's machines make this difficult to do. As our city diversifies, we are likely to need machines that have ballots available in more languages than just English, Spanish, Chinese and, as of this year, Korean. New electronic voting machines have the great advantage of ensuring that voters receive ballots in their native languages. With a touch-screen system, a voter is given a key card that activates the voting machine and can be programmed to produce a ballot in a given language.

City officials have talked about replacing the voting machines for years. Gov. George Pataki's Task Force on Election Modernization recommended they be replaced. The new voting law will provide the resources to do so. But it also will require New York to have a disabled-accessible system available in every precinct, provide voters an opportunity to correct their ballots, provide alternative language ballots, and not exceed a certain vote-error rate, essentially forcing New York's hand in this matter.

As a city that prides itself on being progressive and inclusive, it should not take the federal government to get us to do what has long been necessary to achieve a fully democratic, fair and efficient electoral system.

Tova Andrea Wang is Senior Program Officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation. This article originally appeared in the November 13, 200 issue of New York Newsday.