They were poised to debut in the Las Cruces municipal election next week, but because of a programming error, the state-of-the-art voting machines will have to wait.

"There's a potential for human error in there," said city spokesperson Terrence Kelly. "All of the machines are programmed as such that you could vote in any one of the separate districts, and would require the poll workers to activate which ever district the person was registered to vote in."

Although many support City Clerk Shirley Clark's decision to err on the side of caution, others question why the new voting machines have been stored for so long. Dona Ana County resident Gloria Ortega feels it's a waste of taxpayers money for the machines to go so long without being used. "They should have been used as soon as they bought them, they've been sitting there in storage for a long time and that's not right," she said.

Dona Ana County owns the machines and is loaning the machines to the city. County spokesperson Jess Williams said the new machines have been stored in order to properly train and certify the employees who will be using the machines. Williams also said there's never any hurry since there are enough old machines to do the job.