A new law will modernize and speed the process of reporting election results in New York.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Thursday that will allow county election boards to replace hand-written tallies of vote results with computerized, portable memory devices.

The memory devices that connect to voting machines will be available for the November general elections in New York City, which includes the mayor’s race.

Before the new system, local poll workers took tabulated results produced by electronic voting machines for each race by election district and added up the total votes. The information was then sent to county board offices, where it was entered manually into official databases for release to The Associated Press.

Cuomo says the traditional process produced errors and delays.

(AP)