Um, one, the only thing we can tell you here is that when we had these machines, the chain of custody is followed; whereas we have security seals on all the cardholders, the doors, anything that can be tampered with has security seals with bar codes and numbers on it. Â
Any time a machine is touched, the people who are touching has to be a bipartisan team, whereas one Democratic technician and one Republican technician. Â
And that's not a perf- Â- it's a good system; it's not a perfect system. And you have, you know, a myriad of security issues you have to be concerned about.Â
One of the things that has to happen for every new election is that everything has to be zeroed out at least to the point that we can tell that no votes have been added or anything else, and a ballot has to be programmed. So if there's gonna be any tampering with the ballots being programmed Â- that's where the tampering could be. And the ballots are tampered by bipartisan teams. Â
Video 8. HAVA HeadacheÂ
The federal government under HAVA what they did was that they to some degree financed states, uh, states' implementation of HAVA. New York's been holding its money for several years now. Nassau County's portion of it, um, is Â- and every other county's portion of it Â- is being managed by the State. So when we purchase these machines, it's coming out of the federal money that's been allocated to the States to be broken up by the counties. What I'm concerned about is that if this thing keeps dragging out longer and if these machines can't be used, if we do have to do some type of replacement to go to a different system, then the federal money will not be able to cover the costs of the transition to non leer voting. That means the local taxpayer will have to pick up the cost of several million dollars to buy these machines, which wasn't the intent of HAVA. It was supposed to be that the local governments didn't have to pay for it and the federal government was paying for it.ÂVideo 9. Sleight of HandÂ
One of the things that New York State did right, that was a, was a, that was a good move, and a very, uh, progressive move, was that New York State has its own version of the Help America Vote Act. It's called ERMA Â- the Election Reform and Modernization Act. And one of the strong points of ERMA required that any vending machine company [sic**] that wanted to do business in the State of New York is required to escrow their source codes with the State Board, so they could be tested.Â
The vendors all applied for certification. Then when it came time to surrender their source codes, they hemmed and hawed that they were using like Microsoft technology; and Microsoft, as their vendor, would never surrender their source codes. And then they claimed that it would take them a year to develop their own software program that they could then escrow. But what they left out was when they said that, that it would take a year, it was two and half years from the time that they applied for certification. Â
So if they were really serious about following New York State's standards, they would have been developing their own, um, technology and software programs that could be escrowed. Â
What happened was even more disturbing with this Consent Decree. When they got before the federal judge and the Justice Department, the lawyers for New York State said, "Judge, these machines out there will not submit source code escrow, uh, escrowing their source, uh, software, uh, source codes. Â
And the conclusion was Â- I'm not saying it verbatim Â- but the conclusion, in essence, was the judge said, "I don't care if they don't meet standards. I don't care if they don't meet New York State's, uh, if they can't escrow their software. I want one machine in each polling place."Â
So, the federal judge, by his ordering that Consent Decree, allowed the vendors not to fully comply with a very important and very secure standard.Â
* Attorney Andi Novick advises that HAVA does not require lever machines to be replaced.
** He meant to say "voting machine vendor"Â
Oct. 27 Update: Carl Flatow advises OEN that, "These videos, while mentioned during the NPR broadcast, were NOT released by NPR. Many people who visit ScienceFriday.com make the mistake of thinking that the Web site is part of NPR. ScienceFriday.com is wholly owned and operated by Sciencefriday, Inc. NPR has no ownership or responsibility for the ScienceFriday.com Web site. ScienceFriday, Inc. produces the radio show Talk of the Nation, Science Friday which can be heard on many NPR radio stations."
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