The new voting machines Nassau County residents will use in November are designed to make casting a ballot faster while keeping the voting experience largely unchanged, according to election officials and the machines’ manufacturer.
Voters heading to the polls this fall will use an all-new voting system, after the county Board of Elections selected Clear Ballot’s ClearVote system following a competitive procurement process.
The system will replace the county’s traditional voting equipment, and Nassau will join more than a dozen New York counties that have already adopted ClearVote’s paper-ballot technology.
Although the machines are new, election officials said that voters should notice very little difference in how they cast their ballots. “To the public it will be pretty much the same as they’re used to,” Republican Elections Commissioner James V. Moriarty wrote in a news release. “These machines will be smaller, more efficient and new. New and better equipment.”
The ClearVote system uses full-sized paper ballots that voters fill out by hand or, for those requiring accessibility accommodations, through an ADA-compliant ballot-marking device that prints a full-sized ballot. Every voter ultimately casts the same type of paper ballot, regardless of how it is marked.
The biggest improvements, Democratic Elections Commissioner James Scheuerman explained, will take place behind the scenes, allowing election workers to administer elections more efficiently while preserving the familiar voting experience.
“It’s easier for us to build and run the election and it’s going to be the exact same for the voter, which is what you’re looking for when you’re bringing on a new voting system,” Scheuerman wrote in a news release.
Once a ballot is filled out, it is inserted into a scanner that reads and records the vote while securely storing the ballot for auditing and recount purposes. Unlike some voting systems that rely on barcodes or summary cards, ClearVote records votes directly from the paper ballots, giving voters the chance to visually verify every selection before casting it.
According to Clear Ballot CEO Bob Hoyt, that transparency is central to the company’s philosophy.
“We believe the best way to establish voter trust is through paper ballots,” Hoyt said. “It allows people to verify their own vote before it’s cast so they know that it counted.”
The new scanners also process ballots significantly faster than older equipment. A ballot, Hoyt said, is scanned and accepted almost immediately after it is inserted — about one second — compared with four to five seconds on many older voting systems.
As soon as the ballot is processed, the screen confirms that the vote has been successfully cast and displays a running ballot count. “It processes the ballot almost immediately,” Hoyt said. “You get a message on the screen that your ballot has been cast, and you can actually see the ballot count increase.”
Clear Ballot first came to New York in 2017, providing high-speed scanners for absentee and mail-in ballots and conducting independent post-election audits. The company introduced its first in-person voting system in the state in 2023. Nationally, its election technology is used in 14 states, serving more than 46 million registered voters.
Preparing Nassau County for the transition has been a months-long process. Roughly 500 voting machines have already been delivered for testing and poll worker training, with the remaining equipment — roughly 12 trailer loads — scheduled to arrive beginning later this month.
The company is also implementing a learning-management system that will help Nassau comply with New York’s mandatory poll worker training requirements by documenting training and providing on-demand instructional materials.
“If you train the election workers really well, and you have good equipment and good people servicing it,” Hoyt said, “you’ll probably have a really good election.”
