Yesterday’s vote may be the last statewide election to use lever-action voting machines.

A coordinator who oversees elections for the New York Public Interest Research Group, Neal Rosenstein, said the group’s help line, which it shares with the nonprofit Common Cause, received about a dozen complaints about broken machines by 6 p.m., which he described as “a smattering.” He did not expect to receive many more by the time polls closed at 9 p.m.

The election specialist for the New York City League of Women Voters, Adrienne Kivelson, said her organization’s help line had received only two complaints of broken machines, both in the morning.

Phillip DePaulo, 45, had to vote by emergency paper ballot when he found the buttons for Brooklyn borough president on the machine for district 69, where he lives in Williamsburg, were stuck. He could not find the ballot questions, and asked a poll worker.

“I said, ‘Where’s the referendums,’ and the lady looked at me like I was speaking Greek. I couldn’t vote on the referendums,” he said.

Mr. DePaulo also described officials debating over whether to stop using the machine, with most complaining that counting paper ballots would make more work for them after the polls closed.

Mr. Rosenstein said he received complaints that every machine in a polling place in the Bronx had broken, but that the poll workers had no pens to give voters to fill out their emergency paper ballots.

“It’s a symptom,” Mr. Rosenstein said: Of the more than 30,000 poll workers in the city, “close to 25% are not even trained. … They either failed to show up for the training, or they failed the test at the end and still got hired.”

“To train and keep poll workers is a monumental job,” a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections, Lee Daghlian, said in response.

A spokesman for the city’s board of elections, Christopher Riley, denied that poll workers were untrained.

“That’s an insult to the poll workers who work for us for 14 hours. It’s an insult to say that a quarter of them aren’t trained. It’s an insult to say that one is not trained,” he said.

Mr. Daghlian said that the job of recruiting poll workers would get harder when electronic machines replace mechanical ones.

‘They’ll scare off some of the older people,” he said, adding that many poll workers had been doing the job for decades. “We’re hoping find younger people who are more computer literate.”

All polling places in New York City must have at least one handicapped-accessible voting machine in time for the 2006 elections and must convert to electronic voting machines by 2007 by state law. Other counties in New York must replace their old voting machines by 2006 as a condition of accepting federal funding. The federal government granted New York City a one-year waiver, Mr. Riley said.

A coordinator for the nonprofit watchdog group New Yorkers for Verified Voting, Susan Greenhalgh, said the replacement was a waste of federal tax dollars. The present system uses “a very simple technology that people can understand and work and maintain,” she said, adding that the new machines would be costly and confusing for poll workers.