By Jeanmarie Evelly

Remember those fancy new voting machines the state rolled out last September? Instead of heading into a booth and pulling a lever, voters on Election Day last year filled out paper ballots by hand and feed them into an optical scanning machine (pictured above).

The change was made to ensure an accurate vote count–states were required by federal law to update their voting machines, a response to the 2000 presidential election fiasco. But a report released this week found that flaws with the new method resulted in 50,000 to 60,000 votes across the state going uncounted because they were cast incorrectly, namely because voters “overvoted,” or accidentally shaded in the bubble for more than one candidate for a given seat.

The analysis, by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, reveals that Black and Hispanic voters were at least twice as likely to lose their votes. The Bronx had the highest overvote rate of all the boroughs in the contest for governor: Nearly 1 of every 100 gubernatorial vote cast here was voided as inaccurate by the machines. At one South Bronx polling site, PS 65 on East 141st Street, over 20 percent votes in the governor’s race went uncounted.

Last primary day certainly saw its share of bumps–reports of broken down voting machines and polling sites that were hours late opening led Mayor Bloomberg to public call the Board of Elections’ performance “a royal screw-up.” Locally, there were some issues, with Bronxites telling us their polling sites ran out of pens to fill out ballots.

In the month before last year’s elections, seniors at the Bedford Park Multi Service Center received a demo on the new machines, and many complained that it was confusing and overcomplicated.

“I think they should have left the old machines as they were,” Mary Diab told us at the time.

The main problem, the Brennan Center’s report says, is that the scanning machines did not clearly tell voters that their ballot was filled out incorrectly–the screen letting the voter know they submitted too many votes would pop up with a green “accept” button, leading many to assume they’d done everything right. The State Board of Elections has indicated that it will look to add a clearer warning message when a vote is cast wrong, “hopefully in time for the November 2012 election,” the report states.