NY State Leading from Behind on Voting Machines

Some have criticized NY State for being behind in compliance with the Federal government's HAVA requirements for new voting machines, but in reality our state may be slow because we are being more careful. While many states are simply taking vendor statements at face value (something I NEVER do in my job and our government shouldn't either), NY State has been standing its ground, even if in some cases it has only been because of a lack of decisiveness among our legislators. From Vote Trust USA:

The history of New York's purported non-compliance with Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is a long one. Much has been made of HAVA's lack of requirements for voter-verified paper audit records (VVPARs) or paper ballots that can be used to allow independent verification of e-voting system tallies produced by Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) and Optical Scan (OS) systems (paper ballots provide this capability inherently of course). But bills in the New York State legislature from both sides of the aisle have required VVPARs with random audits since at least 2004. New Yorkers may be stubborn but they're not stupid.

It would be patently absurd to replace a transparent, statewide, non-proprietary, low-tech mechanical lever voting system that even prevents write-in overvotes and can only be corrupted the old fashioned way -- one machine at a time -- with opaque, proprietary, computerized e-voting systems, programmed en masse by as few as a single insider, with no means of independent verification whatsoever. And contrary to popular belief the potential for programming error or malfeasance applies equally to DRE and Optical Scan technologies. Fortunately, the independent verification issue was resolved here years ago; the legislature declared, "There shall be paper." So too was the issue of source code escrow, which recently prompted at least one major e-voting vendor (Diebold Election Systems) not to compete in the state of North Carolina. As in the Tarheel State, the escrow of vendors' proprietary software has been a requirement in New York's legislation for years.

New York law also requires the testing of every e-voting machine or system in the state approved after 1986 with at least 800 votes per year. While some may consider this excessive it's not burdensome to do with optical scanners. However, it should be noted that a typical ballot can have literally trillions of valid vote combinations, all of which cannot be tested. This is one reason why New York law also provides for party representatives and others to audit the ballot definition programming generated by election management systems. The significance of this statute is something that even some in the election integrity community do not yet fully appreciate.

In numerous states we have seen incidents of miscounted races, the outcomes of which were reversed by errors or misconduct affecting ballot programming (also known as election configuration, ballot definition files and election definition). Clearly New York and all other states need to be able to audit this data before it's loaded onto their voting systems for each election and vendors must be required to provide a means for doing so on every machine or scanner to ensure its correctness. New York provides for this, including a formal definition of the Election Configuration, in its latest Voting System Standards approved unanimously by the State Board of Elections last April. After all, verifying the ballot definition can easily be done by any poll worker with a lever machine simply by inspecting the ballot face. Unlike e-voting systems, with lever machines what you see it what you get. Read the Entire Article

In reality our state legislators have simply passed the buck, letting local legislators make the decision. And local legislators have largely been ignoring the issue. But at least there hasn't been the blind trust that some state governments have been showing when company reps try to sell them the most expensive, least reliable machines (DRE machines). The intransigence of NY State just might force some real substantial improvements in the machines offered, if we stand our ground.

As always, I urge you to write your state and local politicians (follow link and look in the left column of the page to find local and state politicians) to tell them you want paper ballots, a reliable system and not the over-priced, more expensive to maintain, unreliable DRE machines. We have to have a paper ballot for recounts and we have to have election software that is transparent so we know how our elections are being run.

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