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NY Rejects E-Voting, DOJ Trying to Force the Issue
CompaniaHill writes "Hastily passed in the wake of the 2000 election mess, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) supposedly offered funding to help states update their voting systems. In reality, the short deadlines have been used to push the sale of untested and uncertified new e-voting systems. Many states continue to demonstrate that the new e-voting machines are not reliable. The New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) took the time to pass their own voting legislation with additional testing and certification standards which far exceed the HAVA standards. As a result, they missed the HAVA deadlines. In March 2006, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued New York to comply with HAVA. Now, the DOJ is serving a motion to try to take away New York's right to select and acquire their own voting machine systems — in effect, to force e-voting machines on New York anyway. At the moment it's too soon to say how the NYSBOE will respond."
I have a friend who is an election judge.
It works like this.
You have members of different parties right there with the ballots. They police each other.
Likewise at the counting station. They don't just had the ballots to a room full of republicans or democrats except in some fairly corrupt locations.
e-machines on the other hand can be silently corrupted. There is no human counterbalance. There is no way to prove that a particular vote was indeed the vote the machine records.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well, even as a liberal, the Florida decision wasn't quite so clear cut as that. They ruled that a partial recount was illegal- just recounting certain key democratic counties. They didn't rule on the legality of a full recount. I happen to agree with them on that- you can't cherry pick what to count. Recount them all or recount none.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The issue isn't one of Congressional authority, it's of civil rights, which of course the DoJ DOES have the authority to enforce, since they are guaranteed by the Constitution. No state has the ability to pass voting legislation that contradicts the US Constitution by, for example, making it more difficult for black voters to register or vote. That's why the DoJ has been monitoring elections in much of the South for so long.
Of course, the whole point of this legal showdown is that HAVA falls far short of guaranteeing anyone's voting rights, so the DoJ would have to show in court that this particular half-measure they're trying to force is superior to NY state's particular half-measure in guaranteeing voting rights. That is far from a sure thing, since the flaws in electronic voting machines are so easily demonstrable and explainable to even the least technical jurist.
So yes, the DoJ certainly has both the right (and responsibility) to be involved in the voting process, but that doesn't mean they're in control. The courts are the only authority that can say any state's voting equipment is unconstitutional, and I doubt they're going to mandate demonstrably insecure electronic voting if NY state can show them some other means of upholding voter rights.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Um, the strict constitutionalists voted in favor of the little guy in the Kelo case.
Voted for the right of the state to take property to give to a private individual: Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.
Voted against the state taking property to give to a private individual: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas (with additional dissent written by Thomas).
Before you go blaming someone, at least get your facts straight. Also, neither (Alito and Roberts) of Bush 43's appointees heard the case. The five voting for it were put in by Ford(Stevens), Reagan (Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork), Bush 41 (Souter) and Clinton (Ginsburg and Breyer). Four of those five are consistently on the side of big government, Kennedy is a tossup depending on the issue.
Alas, the facts have a well known liberal bias and when they don't, we'll just ignore them to slam Bush and conservatives anyway. Cognitive dissonance FTW!
Stop Koolaid Politics
From a vote-counting perspective, the "gold standard" is a paper ballot that is dropped in a box. The box is observed by interested and neutral parties from the time the empty box is put into service at the start of the election day until the vote count is complete. The individual ballots are observed by interested parties from the time the box is opened after the vote until the last ballot is counted.
From a vote-casting perspective the ballot would be legibly markable by any eligible voter without assistance and the voter would know by looking at his marked ballot exactly how the vote-counters would count it. No hung chads, no unclear marks, no double-marks, no ambiguity.
Anything other than this must be proven just as reliable and just as foolproof.
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To meet ADA requirements for blind and mobility impaired users, you need a vote-printing machine and a generic multi-lingual text-to-speech/translation device. The vote-printing device would mark a paper ballot in accordance with the voter's wishes. As a matter of practice device will likely support multiple ballots and multiple languages. The ballot it prints out will be in both English and in the voter's language.
The text-to-speech/translation device will read the ballot back to the voter and translate it to the voter's native language so the voter knows his ballot is correct. While each precinct would have one of these, voters could bring in their own version as well, or rely on a human to read the ballot back. Not relying on the county's machine for this will deter fraud at the read-back stage. For people who did not need text-to-speech or translation features, this machine would double as a ballot-validator, pointing out ambiguous votes due to stray marks as well as and abstentions.
At this point, the person's ballot is just like a correctly-filled-in-by-a-human paper ballot.
The voter drops it in the ballot box and he's done.
The ballot box MAY have a built-in vote-counter but its results will be subject to a later recount of the paper ballots inside.
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Even the ADA does not require that every voter be able to vote without assistance. It is simply not cost-effective to provide unassisted voting for people with multiple severe handicaps who are eligible to vote. Most of these people will be voting absentee anyways, likely with the aid of a nurse or family member.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At least, that was how they are supposed to work.
As I understand it, they are subject to compromise - failing to set the internals correctly could result in zero votes for one of the switches, for example. Also a sensor which prevented you from pulling the big handle without voting was disabled for mysterious reasons in the mid-60s.
Of course, there is no receipt, no paper trail, and no way to assure that your vote has been recorded correctly, or at all.
Give me mark-sense card systems any day. Even IBM cards, hanging chads and all, are better then these 45 year old antiques. You can see one at http://www.newscopy.org/voting_machines/index.html .
Disclaimer: I'm a Election Inspector in New York State. All of what I'm about to say is based on my experience running a polling place and what I've read of the New York State Election Law.
as long as there is some type of backup system (perhaps an absentee ballot to use in place of the machine if there isn't a second machine available on-site), it isn't an issue.
We have a backup system. It's called emergency paper ballots. If the machine breaks down we start using them. They are the same paper ballots that are used for affidavit voters (people who claim to be registered but whom aren't in the poll book) but they go into separate envelopes and can't be disputed or challenged. The end result is the same as if you had voted on the machine.
As for the latter, the machine keeps running totals on vote per candidate and total voters. You can't go add a vote for someone without adding to the running total, which is supposed to match up with the election roll count (ie, we have 357 people who voted at this station today but the machine count shows a total of 413 voters). How do you know which of the 56 votes shouldn't count without invalidating all 357 legitimate votes?
You don't. This is going to be a problem with any voting system. You have to trust the Election Inspectors to ensure that people have properly signed the poll book and meet the requirements to vote. I don't see how you can design any voting system (electronic or otherwise) that preserves the anonymous ballot while providing a way to delete votes that were improperly cast.
Not just that, but the machines are also prone to the poll workers, especially if there isn't someone from each party, deciding to vote on behalf of people who never chose to vote
The New York State Election Law mandates that there be at least one poll worker from each major party present at the polling place. Typically there's two Republicans and two Democrats. We schedule our breaks around this -- both Republicans don't go to lunch at the same time for example. Furthermore, if a voter requires assistance and we have to go into the machine with them, at least TWO inspectors have to go into the machine, one from each party. The Election Law defines the two major parties as the parties that had the highest and second highest vote counts in the last Governor's election. So in theory it need not even be the Democrats and Republicans.
The biggest problem we face is the fact that nobody young bothers to volunteer to work as an Election Inspector. The overwhelming majority of us are old retirees. I'm the exception at 26. The political parties and various county board of elections are constantly fighting to retain enough Inspectors. In some poll places we have had to resort to swearing in registered voters (the Election Law allows this) to serve as Inspectors because something happened (in one district both Republican inspectors had heart attacks within an hour of each other, shit you not...) and the County Board wasn't able to get anybody over to our polling place in a timely manner.
There's also a huge difference between somebody who is 26 years old and somebody who is 80. I could take two random people off the street in their 20s or 30s, spend 20 minutes training them and run the busiest polling place in the state without any issues. It's a different animal when you are working with people in their 80s and 90s. I've seen districts fall apart during primary elections with depressingly low turnout.
The solution to any perceived problems with voting in New York State is to encourage younger people to work as Inspectors. By in large our machines work just fine. Our procedures are just fine. We just need better people. I would encourage anybody who lives in New York State to contact your local board of elections and get put on the list. It's not that much time out of your life -- you have to attend one training class (they
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
But the New York case we're talking about here is dependent largely upon these parts of the Constitution: Article I, Section 4 (in part). The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.
Article II, Section 1 (in part). The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.
Amendment X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Unfortunately, this case seems even less cut-and-dried than Bush v. Gore. I personally feel that, if it gets that far, the court(s) should examine the motivation behind both HAVA and the New York regulations, understand that both are intended to protect the voter, and reach the conclusion that the states have the right under the above parts of the Constitution to provide additional protection under the law to voters above and beyond that provided by Congress.
What happens when you push the button on the electronic screen? Can you tell me?
You either decrease the resistance or increase the capacitance (or in some cases, disrupt an actual standing ultrasonic "sound" wave) between two fine meshes of wires running through the touchscreen. The touchscreen controller debounces this and reports it (either as serial input or by keystroke emulation) to the host device. The host device runs an OS (most likely QNX or PSOS or VX - Or yes, even Linux) that polls the input and reports it to the voting app. The app then reacts by checking who the most recent service tech wanted to win, and adjusting any user errors accordingly. Then the app asks the OS to record the vote, and the OS commits it to whatever (preferably but not necessarily write-once) media it has for that purpose.
Really quite simple, if you break it down into each small step of the process.