Re: NY is ahead behind ahead behind
They were indeed old and required upkeep and storage etc. OTOH the new scanners will be obsolete by the time I finish typing this. Maybe the next generation will be configured to fit into the same scheme, accepting the same forms and producing the same data. OK, you can stop laughing. Of course the makers of the current generation of voting equipment will have the States over a barrel because the scanners will fail, the software will no longer be supported, the machines on which the software runs will cease to be available, and nobody even understands the current version, let alone any future ones.
The old machines were decades old, the people who knew how to service them were retiring (or dying) in droves, but for all that they worked. We are now probably locked into a 10-year, and possibly even a 5-year, turnover cycle where the system will have to be reworked over and over with all the pitfalls for security and integrity implied by that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
