One voter in all of Allegheny County can push the levers today in a mechanical voting machine.

	John Heller, Post-Gazette Julie Downs bought her 800-plus-pound voting machine from Allegheny County for $40, and it sits in the living room of her Point Breeze home. Click photo for larger image.

After all, she paid for it.

Carnegie Mellon University professor Julie Downs was one of the bidders this summer when Allegheny County auctioned off, via the Web site www.publicsurplus.com, 3,234 of its old voting machines to make way for touch-screen models voters are using today.

One bidder, scrap metal dealer Snyder Group, won 3,233 of the 40-year-old machines, for $40 apiece.

Dr. Downs bid $40 and won the other one.

Seems like a good deal until you learn that it cost her $300 to have the 800-plus-pound, 6-foot-wide behemoth delivered from the county's North Side warehouse to the only corner of her living room where it will fit.

"When my floor collapses, that'll be another thing," she jokes. But she seriously wanted one of the contraptions ever since she moved to Pittsburgh about a decade ago. The California girl had previously voted on paper ballots.

"I had never seen a machine like that before. It was like something out of another century," she says appreciatively. When she first heard about the concept of pulling the party lever, "I thought that was a figure of speech. I didn't realize you could literally pull the party lever" to vote for all of that party's candidates.

Dr. Downs works, appropriately, in CMU's Department of Social and Decision Sciences, where she is director of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication. While she is interested in voting decisions and policy, "I can't imagine a work function" for the voting machine.

She has mused about using it with her book group, to vote on which books to read, but so far is mostly keeping the box folded up in the corner of the red room. "It doesn't really go with my decor," she says. "I'm going to have to get something to get it to fit in, like a voting machine cozy."

She's surprised to be the only citizen to buy one. "I thought there was going to be a mad rush on them." There were a handful of others bidding for one machine, but they dropped out, less dedicated than she. "Oh, I was absolutely willing to pay $100."

She happened to bid before the Snyder Group did in the "Dutch auction," which meant she got first crack at one machine.

Upon winning, she got a call from the county, asking her what she planned to do with the thing.

Kevin Evanto, spokesman for Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato, confirmed that Dr. Downs was the only individual to buy one of the old machines. As did the scrap dealer, she paid the auction fee, taxes and moving charges, so the county made a total of $129,360 on the sale.

The county has kept 50 "basically for historical purposes," adds Mr. Evanto, who says one will be donated to the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.

The rest of the old voting machines are history, says Snyder Group metals trader Ken Puckett. The company trucked them to its Neville Metals recycling yard on Neville Island, where they were almost immediately munched by a 3,000-horsepower shredder into about 1,400 tons of mostly high-grade steel.

"By now," Mr. Puckett says, "that product is already included in some steel products somewhere. It could be an automobile hood or a new appliance or whatever."

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 required local governments across the country to replace lever and punch-card voting machines by the first election with federal candidates in 2006. For Pennsylvania, that was the primary in May. Voters across Allegheny County and most neighboring counties are casting their votes today on ATM-like iVotronic machines made by Election Systems & Software Inc., a Nebraska company. The county's contract paid ES&S $11.9 million for 4,700 machines. You can learn how they work at the Web site www.votespa.com.