The DOJ's position in the motion papers filed this week is extremely honest for an agency that has perverted any notion of voting rights. They say in essence: NY be HAVA-compliant in time for 2008, which to them means buy machines that are defective and vulnerable-to-hacking, and cave to Microsoft: after all you don't really need to know how the vendors are counting the people's votes and besides- it's not like the people are ever going to know the truth because no one is allowed to tell them!
Secret vote counting by the corporations or the government is still secret vote counting, as far as the people are concerned. The feds just want to make sure the vote counting remains concealed from the people and that the machines we are forced to vote on can be manipulated.
The solution: New York can become HAVA-compliant for the 2008 election and not ignore its laws by getting ready to hand count the federal races. The federal government doesn't have control over the state elections so we can still use our levers for the state elections or we can hand count those races too. New York needs to provide an accessible means for all members of our community to vote independently and can do this by supplying ballot marking devices (BMDs) in the polling places. The paper ballots produced with the assistance of the BMD can be hand counted along with everyone else's paper ballots. Between the BMDs and the hand-counted paper ballots- New York will be HAVA-compliant, ready to have secure, reliable, transparent elections for 2008.
The rub: Our state government doesn't want to be bothered with the only secure, reliable electoral system current technology permits: hand-counting. In answer to their belittling the very idea of hand counting out of hand (so to speak) our officials tell us about the fraud that existed when we hand counted for one hundred plus years. What they don't say is the level of insider manipulation when we hand counted is child's play compared to the wholesale election theft enabled by computerized voting systems.
The Players:
The Department of Justice: The DOJ is headed up by the un-American John Tanner who as chief of the voting rights section has eliminated anyone concerned with the legitimate mission of protecting the people's right to vote and replaced them with people hell bent on disenfranchising millions of Americans The DOJ's efforts to deprive citizens of their right to vote has been overt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KerwQWpBBIs. To name just a few there was the firing of the US Attorneys who refused to prosecute phony "voter" fraud cases; the unprecedented move by Tanner to use the DOJ to cover up the rigging of the presidential election in Ohio, http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004438.php; Tanner's overruling the objections that the Georgia photo ID law would disproportionately discriminate against African-Americans – the same law a federal appeals judge subsequently declared was comparable to a Jim Crow-era poll tax, http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=321.
The New York State Board of Elections: Two Democrat and two Republican State Election Commissioners responsible for deciding which voting systems will be certified for use in NY. They are only considering computerized voting systems sold by the same handful of irresponsible vendors. They are only considering systems which process and/or count the votes in secret. They are not considering any non-vendor, publicly accountable, publicly controlled voting systems.
The New York State Legislature: Abdicated responsibility for providing secure elections by passing laws which permit New York to purchase DRE and Optical Scan computers; then left it to the SBOE to certify these partisan vendor voting systems and then passed the buck to the appointed election commissioners of the 62 individual counties in NY to decide what's best for their county. As gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer said about the Legislature's abdication and the vulnerability of these voting systems:
It was a mistake from the start for the State Legislature to pass the buck to our counties rather than craft legislation that would have specified a single technology for adoption statewide. As a result we’re looking at the very real possibility of a patchwork of different voting machines with different levels of accuracy and accessibility throughout the State.
State government’s failure of leadership is especially disconcerting in light of widespread reports of the unreliability and potential for fraud of electronic voting machines.
The Governor: Since becoming governor Eliot Spitzer has done nothing to make good on his criticism stated above. As Attorney General he not only found time to criticize the Legislature for failing the citizens, but was a crusader against corporate fraud and irresponsibility. He continues to have these same responsibilities as Governor but has not assumed them. Under NY's laws "non-responsible" vendors are ineligible to do business in NY. The Governor could prevent these vendors from selling their defective, flawed voting systems in NY by simply doing the executive's job of examining the overwhelming evidence of irresponsibility against these vendors and protecting New Yorkers from these unethical vendors, but he too has abdicated responsibility. See Voting System Companies Fail to Meet New York State’s Requirements for "Responsible Contractors", More Evidence of Vendor Unfitness, by Andi Novick, Esq., And More by Andi Novick, Esq.
The Attorney General: The Attorney General represents the state of New York in the litigation with the DOJ. The Attorney General, as the chief legal officer of the State of New York, is supposed to represent the people's interests. What happens when the people's interests and the State's interests differ? Looks like the people lose.The People: Elections belong to the people- not their governments. If the people can't see that their votes are being accurately counted, they have lost their constitutionally protected right to vote, which includes the right to know that one's vote has been counted. Voting on computers disenfranchises people because people cannot see how their vote is being processed inside the black box of a computer. A recent Zogby poll documented a record breaking 92% of Americans insist on the right to watch their votes being counted. 80% strongly object to the use of secret computer software to tabulate votes without citizen access to that software.
No one is representing the people's right to an observable, transparent, reliable electoral process?
That is the true crisis in New York!
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