A lawsuit filed by the federal government yesterday against the state of New York could mean chaotic elections this fall, experts warn.

With the lawsuit, the Department of Justice seeks to force the state Board of Elections to purchase voting machines that are accessible to the disabled in time for the primary election in September.

But some experts who have criticized New York for doing next to nothing in recent years to procure new voting machines warn that the lawsuit might prompt state officials to make the wrong decisions.

“After all the fiddling of thumbs at the state Board of Elections, we’re in no position to have a wholesale change to our voting process in time for this September election,” an election law expert at the New York Public Interest Research Group, Neal Rosenstein, said. “If the Justice Department’s goal for this year’s election is chaos they should go full steam ahead.”

Mr. Rosenstein warned that new electronic machines might result in confusion among poll workers who will not be able to properly assist disabled voters. More generally, Mr. Rosenstein said New York should have ample time to examine various different types of voting machines before it uses millions of federal dollars to order thousands of units.

The suit, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Albany, seeks to force New York to comply with the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 in reaction to the “long count” in Florida in 2000 that left America waiting to see who would win the presidency.

“This first suit is as close to a broadside as you’re going to see on HAVA implementation,” the director of an online forum of election law information, electiononline.org, Doug Chapin, said.

Many provisions of the law requiring that states procure new voting equipment became effective in 2006. The lawsuit comes from the Department of Justice, which is controlled by a Republican president, against a state also controlled by a Republican, Governor Pataki.

“HAVA contains important reforms designed to ensure that elections for federal office will both allow access to all voters and ensure the integrity of the process,” an assistant attorney general for civil rights, Wan Kim, said in a press release. “We believe today’s lawsuit will help ensure that New York vot ers enjoy the benefits of these important reforms.”

The lawsuit singles out two provisions of HAVA that New York has failed to comply with. One provision requires that states compile an electronic database of voters to prevent voter fraud and ensure no eligible voters are excluded on Election Day.

HAVA also requires that each of New York’s 7,200 polling places have at least one voting machine that is accessible to the disabled.

The Department of Justice complaint also protests New York states’s failure to use more than $49 million in federal aid to begin replacing its 20,000 lever action voting machines. New York is eligible to lose those millions if the state fails to act by the September primary election, the complaint states.

The lawsuit came after weeks of talks between the state Board of Elections and the Department of Justice, a spokesman for the board, Robert Brehm, said.

“New York has adopted a policy that we wish to do it right and do it right the first time and not rush to meet some arbitrary deadline and put systems in place that will put in jeopardy voters’ rights or an election,” Mr. Brehm told The New York Sun.

Mr. Brehm cautioned that hasty action might result in the state ordering voting machines that were later judged to not be compliant with HAVA.

While Mr. Brehm said that each polling place will have a handicappedaccessible voting machine by September, he said that other changes, such as replacing the state’s lever-action voting machines, will wait.

Lawsuit or not, purchasing new election equipment is a complex undertaking, Mr. Rosenstein said. Long before each county trains its poll workers in the new machine, voting equipment companies need first to produce machines compliant with rules that the state election board has not yet written, Mr. Rosenstein said.