However, the State Board’s plan includes a dangerous proposal which would allow for partially functioning touch-screen recording computers (DRE’s) — that’s right, the same type of machine that caused the Sarasota debacle in 2006. This proposal would pay about 50% more per machine. DREs, not designed as ballot markers, produce paper trails that are non-compliant with NY’s ballot requirements and cannot be verified by the blind, as New York requires. Such a plan permits counties to buy flawed DREs, prior to certification, bypassing the rigorous security testing these machines have failed in other states, most recently, California.
~
The paper trail HAVA mandates is not the much sought-after paper record of each voter’s choices, only machine-generated printouts of race totals. And the touch-screen computers that resulted in Sarasota’s 18,000 undervotes and recent elections with hundreds of thousands more votes than voters were all compliant with HAVA’s “looser guidelines”.
~
The US Justice Department, sadly, is not the Don Quixote for fair elections, but rather a bulldozer, leveling stable election systems and leaving a trail of trashed, defective -- but compliant -- touch-screen computers in its wake. It doesn’t even acknowledge, or care, that four entire states, New Mexico, Florida, Maryland and Virginia, have legislated discarding millions of dollars of insecure, unreliable and exorbitant touch-screen computers -- all meeting federal guidelines -- or that Senate legislation has been introduced to phase out DREs starting in 2012.
~
New York, wisely, has adopted stringent regulations to avoid repeating these election -- and financial -- disasters.
Why isn’t the Justice Department suing, instead, the unethical vendors responsible for this mess?
~
Marge Acosta
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
