Article: Save NY's lever machines!

Dear friends,

I assume many of you have received an email including misleading information from New Yorkers for Verified Voting & the League of Women Voters regarding New York's Lever Voting System, Democracy and the Law. Unfortunately the two position papers and the press release recently distributed, misrepresents the law. Their Statement on NY's Lever Machines sets up what appears to be higher standards for a voting system and then rejects the lever machines as not meeting those standards. In fact the lever machines are far superior to the minimum standards set by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), now being touted by NYVV/LWV.

The Election Transparency Coalition has issued this 2 page paper http://sites.google.com/site/remediaetc/home/documents/Adem-compliantvotingsystem.pdf explaining the superiority of the transparent lever technology over software technology, which is so inadequate and theft-inviting in its concealed operation that the best we can do is manually count paper to try to catch the undetectable fraud enabled by software. But in NY we will only first attempt to verify the software's results by hand counting some ballots after the election is over, thus exposing the ballots to increased opportunities for unseen tampering which would then render verification impossible! That unfortunately is the verification urged in NYVV/LWV's first position paper.

There was a second position paper issued by NYVV/LWV regarding NY's lever machines and HAVA, which purports to state facts that are not facts, but rather represent a specious legal interpretation of HAVA that was put forth by the EAC, a federal agency administering HAVA under the Bush administration. That would be the same EAC that infamously rewrote the bipartisan findings of a report that had not found the evidence of voter fraud (not to be confused with election fraud) which the EAC was hoping for in order to justify restrictive voter ID laws, so the EAC just rewrote the report and ignored the findings! What NYVV has misrepresented as "facts" are merely the interpretation held by the EAC, and now apparently NYVV and the LWV, which has never been ruled on by a court. It is absolutely untrue to say that HAVA requires replacement of our lever machines. HAVA does not say that. As the paper linked to above explains, our lever voting system augmented with accessible ballot marking devices, is now HAVA-compliant and more importantly, democracy-compliant in a way concealed software-based scanners and DREs can never be.

Please go to http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/ to take action to save the last transparent, theft-deterring state-wide voting system in the country. If we can pressure NYS's government to resist the federal government's plan to spend billions of taxpayers dollars for inaccurate, inaccessible, unauditable, unreliable voting equipment that counts our votes in secret, we can be a beacon to the nation.

Help us get more county resolutions in support of retaining our levers. Write to every state and federal official linked at our site, especially your county legislators. There's a letter at the blog site for you to send. Dutchess County and we expect shortly more of the Hudson Valley will pass resolutions. Get your county to join the groundswell.

Sign & circulate the Petition to Save Our Levers http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/save_ny_levers

Join our newly started group on Facebook to help us circulate more widely across the State: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49170305479

Please volunteer some time and donate to our efforts. As it says in our paper linked above- "Democracy (demos = people, kratos = rule) requires that all citizens have equal access to power." The Election Transparency Coalition needs some more citizen power to save our democracy.

Thank you,

Andi Novick
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition, http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/