The New York City Board of Elections voted Tuesday to buy the Election Systems and Software electronic voting machines as a way to improve how the city counts votes and to speed up lines at polling places.

Six voted in favor of the Nebraska-based company; one voted in favor of the Dominion system, and two abstained.

The contract is estimated to cost about $50 million.

The board will buy between 5,000 and 7,000 machines.

"It's a big contract. This is the largest city in the United States, but we are really proud of the fact that New York City had the confidence in us to move forward," said Election Systems and Software President and CEO Aldo Tesi.

With the new system, voters will fill in a paper ballot and then feed the ballot into the machine, which will tally the votes.

"There's a new way of voting in New York City," said BOE Commissioner J.C. Polanco. "One of the things we're going to be focusing on is ensuring that every voter in the city feels comfortable with this new system and confident that their vote is going to counted accurately and it will be verifiable. So this is a very good thing."

The machines are supposed to be in place for the September primary.

Prior to Tuesday's vote, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio unveiled a new voter outreach program that he hopes the board will implement to educate voters about the new system.

"As much as we're excited about these changes, we're very, very concerned that a change of this magnitude could have a number of unintended consequences," said the public advocate. "And it might not serve to engage all the voters of this city as we need it to."

The changes were needed to put the city and state in compliance with federal regulations that were approved after the controversy that surrounded the 2000 presidential election.

New York State is the only place in the nation that has yet to comply with these regulations, which were laid out in the Help America Vote Act.