Pages 26-27:
To satisfy the United States' motion that the State become HAVA-compliant for the federal election (since that is the only election relevant to the federal statute), the State only has to hand count the two Federal races in 2008, providing BMDs in every polling place so that disabled voters could create the same paper ballots as abled voters. Amici have gone to great lengths to assist New York by determining what would be required to hand count these two races, demonstrating as well how simple and feasible it would be for New York to return to a hand count for 2008's Federal election.
Rady Ananda and Dave Berman have analyzed the official data for each New York county and, using a forecast tool designed by Mr. Berman expressly for this purpose, have demonstrated that New [sic] will require only four citizen-counters in each polling place to be able to count the two races in less than four hours.2929The forecast tool is based on the procedures as explained to Mr. Berman by New Hampshire's Assistant Secretary of State, Anthony Stevens. Forty-five percent of New Hampshire's polling places still hand count their ballots and, as explained in greater detail in the Tobi declaration, New Hampshire's ballots are far more complex, and their precincts larger, than New York's. [WDNC: Note that the first part of this footnote is among the points of clarification in my declaration. I did not attend Assistant Secretary Stevens' presentation or ever meet or speak with him. The forecast tool was inspired by a .pdf of Stevens' presentation on the website of Democracy For New Hampshire.]Page 29 - arguing that lever machines are HAVA compliant, and that failing to approve HCPB, all levers would still be preferable to anything electronic:
Lever machines do produce a permanent paper record. Some lever machines imprint the total number of votes cast onto a piece of paper. At the close of the election, poll workers remove the paper from the lever machine and use it to create another paper record of the tallies. Other lever machines don't produce an imprinted piece of paper with the tallies, but the poll workers perform the same function, taking the voting tallies off the lever machines and writing them down on a piece of paper, thus satisfying HAVA's requirement for a permanent paper record.The United States' argument that the lever machine doesn't produce a permanent paper record with manual audit capacity presumably ignores the human being's role as part of the "voting system". However, just as with a hand count, a human being is very much a part of the voting system, and in the case of lever machines a human being is producing the permanent paper record required by HAVA.2929 It is worth observing that there are voting systems which the United States considers HAVA-compliant that clearly do not "produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity" as required by the statute. Certainly no paperless DRE can be said to produce a permanent record, but the United States is not suing those states with paperless DREs to compel their compliance with HAVA. Moreover the paper produced by DREs with printers attached to them, creating so-called voter verified paper audit trails (VVPATs), have been shown unreliable for auditing purposes in that they have been known to have as high as 20% unreadability, and as corroborated in the recent reports from California, can be rigged to correspond to the electronic tally, neither equating with the machine's official tally.* * *
I have immense respect and admiration for all the people working on this project, many of whom I haven't named and some of whom I may not even realize are on the team. I believe that everyone understands what a long shot this is but I have seen nothing but positivity toward the project. We know that regardless of the outcome of the case, in which we are neither plaintiff nor defendant, we have created a new body of work that advances the election integrity movement and will serve as a future reference countless times. In this way, I again cite confluence with the Voter Confidence Committee's Humboldt hand-count campaign.
In Thursday's media advisory, we did not just request public information from the Registrar, we made a leap in our framing. Months ago, when our Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County was first released, we postured "Hand-Counting Paper Ballots Is On The Table - Let The Community Dialog Begin!" Like the District Court in NY, with enough information to demonstrate the time, cost, labor and other logistical concerns, the Humboldt community shall now be asked to judge the viability of our proposal.
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