As if getting New Yorkers to the polls on Primary Day wasn’t difficult enough, the city’s new voting machines may make it harder. Although New York managed to hold on to its lever machines longer than any other state in the country, tomorrow’s primaries will mark the debut of the controversial modernized system.

Alexandra DiPalma Janet Virgil and Jacquie Tellalian on First Avenue.

“I read all about the new machines and have seen the commercials, but I still don’t really get it,” said Jacquie Tellalian, 56 of Midtown, who was strolling on St. Marks Place recently. “They look like a nightmare from hell. It’s like, isn’t there an easier way?”

Rather than simply pulling a red lever, voters use pens to mark bubbles on paper ballots. These ballots are then fed through an optical scanner.

On Aug. 31, the city Board of Elections launched a campaign intended to familiarize voters with the new process, which replaces the machines that have been used since the 1960s.

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Rachel Wise

On its face, The Local East Village is a collaborative experiment between a learning institution, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a newspaper, The New York Times — but it’s much more than that.

The Local has been conceived and designed to help foster a journalistic collaboration with a third partner, our neighbors in the East Village. The site is designed to reflect our community, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people in a wide-reaching online public forum and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves.

Our coverage area — which extends from Broadway to the East River, 14th Street to Houston Street — is home to roughly 70,000 people and features a sturdy and robust blogosphere. What can we contribute? A healthy respect and appreciation for our neighbor blogs; the academic and intellectual resources of NYU; the vast journalistic experience and high professional standards of The Times; and a commitment to do our best to reflect the richness and texture of life in the community we share.

We hope, too, to provide innovation: For years now the lines between those who produce news and those who consume it have become increasingly blurred. And so we hope to bring our readers even more into the process of producing news in ways that few other sites have tried before.

One of those ways is through the Virtual Assignment Desk, an application produced by students at New York University and which makes its debut on this site. It is designed to provide readers with a seamless, intuitive tool for interacting with the process used in producing and shaping news. Those who use the desk can identify stories that they would like to see covered or volunteer to cover assignments themselves.

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Tomorrow is Primary Day.

Voters in New York who are registered in a party can cast ballots to nominate their party’s candidates for a variety of elected offices, including United States Senator, United States Congress, governor, attorney general and state legislators.

Usually only the party faithful — those most devoted to a party, personality, cause or political philosophy — come out to vote on Primary Day, which always occurs in mid-September in New York (Sept. 11, 2001 was a primary day).

This year an extra element of drama is added to the day, as it is the first election in which New Yorkers will no longer cast their ballots by flipping a lever in those old, clunky, mechanical machines. Instead, voters will write their choices on a paper ballot, then slip them into an optical scanner, where the votes will be recorded.

Here’s some news you can use if you intend to vote tomorrow:

WHEN: Every polling place in New York City is open from 6 a.m.-9 p.m.

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Jenn Pelly The East Village.

For much of the past year, The New York Times and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University have been working to bring you — our neighbors in the East Village — this experiment in journalistic collaboration.

As we launch The Local today, know that what you are seeing is not the culmination of that work, but rather the beginning of it. And so we start with our most important task, extending an open invitation to everyone in our community to participate in our site, which is designed to provide news, offer a forum for perspectives and opinion and promote a neighborhood-wide conversation about the issues that mean the most to us in this community.

You’ll see posts about some of those issues today — stories about culture and politics, the voices of established neighborhood institutions and those that are emerging — that will give you some idea of what we’re about as a site.

We’ll talk more about the The Local’s mission later today, but first I’d like to introduce you to some of the people behind the site and invite you to engage with us all.

I’m Rich Jones, the editor, and a former reporter at The New York Times who is now a visiting professor at NYU. I consider myself a storyteller in the tradition that puts the focus on the story and not the teller. So in the days and weeks ahead, my voice will recede from the site and be replaced by all of you telling your own stories about our community.

Some of you have already met Kim Davis, our community editor, who is an important liaison between the site and our neighbors.

Mary Ann Giordano, a deputy metro editor at The Times, is a coordinator of The Local blogs under whose guidance we will produce the site. Jim Schachter, an associate managing editor at The Times, will also play a key oversight role.

At NYU, the project has been led by Brooke Kroeger, the director of the Carter Institute, and Jay Rosen, whose students and faculty colleagues in the Studio 20 concentration, especially Jason Samuels, have played a crucial research and development role in laying the foundation for the site.

Many of the posts will be contributed by the students in the Hyperlocal News class, which is led by Yvonne Latty, Mary Quigley and Darragh Worland, and recognition should be given to the support provided by the larger community at NYU, including students, professors and administrators in journalism, at the Stern School of Business, at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, as well as from our deans of the Faculty of Arts and Science, Jess Benhabib and Dalton Conley. The project has also benefitted from the good offices of NYU Provost David McLaughlin and President John Sexton.

And, of course, I must acknowledge the most significant ingredient in our collaboration — you. Ours is one of the most distinct neighborhoods in New York — full of color and energy, heart-wrenching sadness and unexpected humor and uncommon grace. In other words, it is a wonderful place for us to tell stories.

Let’s all get to work.