Video 4. Federal Override?Â
They've approved three voting systems, two of them which are being used in New York State. One is Sequoia, which is being used in most of the counties and the ES&S system which is being used in New York City. Um, they've been submitted to the New York State for certification. They've been submitted to the federal Election Assistance Commission for certification. None of them have been able to be certified. Â
One of them Â- when we picked Sequoia, we were told that they would probably be certified some time in March or April. We are now in almost the middle of September and the situation's gotten worse. They haven't been able to be certified. Â
The co-chair of the State Board of Elections sent out a email to the Elections Commissioners about a month ago saying that he was very concerned that they weren't going to be able to meet established timelines under this federal consent decree and it's possible these machines may not be able to be certified. Â
And, in that case, Nassau County has purchased $5 million worth of machines that can't be used for the purpose of actually scanning and counting the ballots. Right now, the machines that we have now have Â- has a optical scanner and a handicapped accessible ballot marking device. The theory was that we could have used, under the Consent Decree, we could have used one in each one of the 400 polling places this November and continue to use the lever machines, and then come '09, replace the lever machines and get an additional 800 optical scanners, keep the ballot marking device in each one of the polling places, and the optical- the additional optical scanners will fill in the place what the levers are doing now.
If these machines can't be certified for use, they can't be used.  So, that creates a problem because the judge has demanded a timeline. The Justice Department and the State of New York has agreed to a timeline that says this happens in September of '09. Â
And then it becomes a constitutionality issue. Can they force us to use machines that are not certifiable? That can't be done or haven't been demonstrated to be absolutely accurate and, and auditable, and reliable. ÂVideo 5. $5 Million Down the Drain?Â
And we've had, we've had tussles with the, with the vendor, with the State. I think, you know, everybody's tried to do everything but I think the State Board of Elections is a small agency that is being overwhelmed by what they're being required to do. They have a small staff, uh, a number of staff members that could help them. They've been using outside vendors.Â
Initially, when we got our first several hundred machines, we had a lot of problems with, you know, broken machines, cracked monitors, uh, dead batteries, you know, uh, poor fabrication of it. And, we've been working with the vendor and the State and the Justice Department for the past several months on a remedial plan to get those machines repaired or replaced and so far, it's going pretty well. You know, the major problems have been corrected. And we're awaiting a delivery of another 210 machines as of today, which is September 12th and, uh, hopefully, we'll be, uh, those machines will be better received than the other 240 we received.Â
We would hope that we would be in a position that the machines that we actually buy, and spend millions of dollars on, are machines that we can actually use. But that's in question right now whether that's even the case. We've spent about five million dollars on these new machines and we know we can use them as ballot marking devices. But, right now, we don't know if we can actually use them as scanners to count the vote. ÂVideo 6. Guinea Pigs?Â
Has been using it..., the Dominion ImageCast machine, the optical scanning components, have been used somewhat successfully in the Ontario Province of Canada. We've done research on its history and it's, you know, they gave us some degree of comfortability. The new component that they've partnered with this Â- this ballot marking device where you have an audio component; you have the, you know, the technical keyboard; you have a rocker panels; you have a sip-and-puff apparatus Â- that's a totally new component that my understanding is has never been used anywhere in the United States or anywhere else. Â
So right now, we really are the guinea pigs for a new type of system. And, I think that's a lot of the problems that we're seeing are they're rushing this new model or new, um, technology into the market without it being fully tested. Â
In Nassau County where we had a Republican primary, we had 146,000 eligible voters. Only twelve voters actually took the time to vote on these machines. So, the jury's out.ÂVideo 7. What the HackÂ
Up until now, we used the lever technology machines. On those things, you could tell if they're working, pretty evidently. If there's some, some reason it's not recording a vote, you'll know about it right away. So you open the back of the machine and the votes either will be there or they won't be there. Uh, and there's very little play. If the lever machine goes down, it usually goes down Â- the entire machine goes down. Â
This new technology, what we've Â- with the new voting machines, what we've done as we've gotten deliveries, we've actually sat there and fired up to make sure that everything on it works. That's when we've encountered problems Â- when we tested to see if everything works. It think there's been two dozen individual studies that show that this, uh, voting machine technology software Â- no matter what the vendor, or the, or the system is Â- it is susceptible to hacking.Â
So you ask yourself, "Why would we agree to a system like that?"Â And that's one of the things that Congress really never addressed in the Help America Vote Act.Â
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