I wish to share with you a quote from the Nassau County BoE Commissioner which a colleague sent me in response to a draft of this letter. I believe it captures precisely what I had been trying to convey herein:
I can only speak for myself, although I am certain that all other Commissioners in the State of New York feel as impassioned as I do. My main responsibility is to the voters, to ensure that my Board does all it can to implement the law as well as to guarantee fair, just, accurate elections. Up until now I have felt secure and confident that I have been able to do this. Through the use of the Automatic Lever Voting Machines, though aged, I am able to certify election results and I am certain of the accuracy by which we conduct our elections. --John A. De Grace, Nassau County BoE Commissioner (R) Dec. 20, 2005 testimony to SBoE in NYC.
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/NYSBOE/HAVA/HAVAhearing-NYC.pdf
It is not only election officials' sense of duty and responsibility that will be undermined by the introduction of DREs and optical scanners, but the electoral system built up over the past 150 years depends on the fulfillment of election officials' duties. The system required that they be afforded every opportunity to know that the canvass of the vote speaks the truth. But the legislature has rendered it impossible for them to know and if they can't know than the citizens, to whom those duties are owed, can't know either. The entire electoral system falls once we blindfold our election officials through the use of these computers.
I am writing this to all of you now because I want everyone reading this to know that a grave injustice is about to be committed. Perhaps the greatest injustice we can be dealt in a democratic society. Everything I've written is borne out both by the case law and legislative history as well as in the dozens of reports from computer scientists revealing the vulnerability and unobservability of computerized voting. Every other state in the country is struggling with this now-- holding elections that no one can know were reliable; switching from DREs to optical scanners in the hope that the frying pan is better than the fire; hand counting ballots because these computers and the performance of the vendors have been so disastrous. This is coming at great cost to the counties of the country and it is the taxpayers who are hurting. Ultimately it is all of us who lose. We are all citizens be we election commissioners, poll workers, everyday people, even legislators. But it is the legislators who are to blame because it is the legislators whose responsibility it is to create an observable, secure, fair and honest electoral system.
What can be done to prevent this travesty? How can New Yorkers save themselves from the fate of the rest of the country? We can continue to vote on our lever machines until the legislature is forced to go back and read their history and come up with a better plan if they don't like the existing one (which I can tell you from having looked at the legislative history, they never found there was a problem with the existing system, a prerequisite one would think before making such a monumental change to a century old electoral system). Our legislators no doubt will blame the Help American Vote Act (HAVA), but the only change HAVA required us to make was to provide an accessible means for disabled voters to cast a vote independently. We have done that. NY will be installing ballot marking devices (BMDs) in every polling site for the 2008 election. BMDs do not count votes, they create ballots. There is nothing in HAVA that requires us to abandon our lever machines.
Many of you have been told that the DoJ does not approve of our lever machines and that it is the DoJ's opinion that they do not comply with HAVA. That's nice, but it's not the law. We still have a functioning judicial system in this country and until a higher court rules on the lever machine's compliance with HAVA there is no ruling and nothing requiring New York to abandon its levers. Many of us who have read HAVA believe levers are fully compliant now that we have provided BMDs. See for eg. the testimony of SBOE Commissioner Douglas A. Kellner to the NYC Voter Assistance Commissioner on December 7, 2004:
"The federal Help America Vote Act, 42 USC §§15301 et seq., will require substantial changes in election administration for the 2006 elections. In particular, 42 USC § 15481, sets minimum standards for voting machines. Our lever machines satisfy all but one of those standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is 'accessible for individuals with disabilities, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.'
Apparently our legislature has capitulated to the federal government's interpretation or succumbed to a short-sighted hunger to get their hands on some dollars – dollars that will be eaten up a dozen times over if NY goes down this path of replacing our levers with computers -- (I apologize to those individual state legislators who are not part of the majority of Democrats and Republicans who are responsible for overturning 150 years of a wise and established electoral system). Were a court to rule that levers are not HAVA-compliant we can hand count the few federal races and stay on our levers for the state races (HAVA only applies to the federal races, of which there are 2 this year). Even the DoJ agrees that hand counting is HAVA-compliant. And should we be required to give up our levers for the federal election and switch to hand counting for those two races, under HAVA we are entitled to those dollars the federal government has been holding out to entice our state legislators.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
