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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."
Neither are paper ballots, depending on who's counting them.
With the upcoming primaries and presidential election, this will go rapidly to SCOTUS. And they will stick it up DOJ's ass and break it off - one thing this court is known for is pushing federalism, and telling the states the exact means by which they will hold their elections is a HUGE violation of that.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"Commissioners of the Elections Board, which has been sued by the federal agency for not complying with election-modernization law, voted 3-1 to take up the matter in closed session." Italics mine.
That's a clear sign it's out of the voters hands. I would guess that when they roll over, they've got plenty of public service jobs waiting for them.
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Section 4. 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.
It seems to me that unless Congress mandates e-voting the DOJ has no power to force it upon a state. The HAVA appears to provide funds for but does not mandate electronic voting. Even if it did, a state could mandate voting for Senators at a place with no electrical outlets and Congress could not change that; alternatively, is a voting both a "place?"
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Not to nitpick (don't you love how people say not to _____ when they're just about to _____) but the feds don't have ANY rights.
They have powers, which are based on the rights of the people. So, the better way to say this is "the feds are empowered to protect the rights of citizens by ensuring fair voting".
Please be careful, because the distinction is not trivial, especially in the current political climate.
we should have nothing but paper ballots. not even mechanical voting machines, and definitely not electronic voting machines
the reason is trust. trust in your voting process is extremely important to the confidence and integriy of society. now of course you can fake paper ballots, lose them, etc. it is just that, for every method you find to "hack" paper ballots, there are 10 more ways to hack mechanical voting, and 100 times more ways to attack electronic voting. increased complexity leads to more attack vectors. simple as that
you can scan the paper ballots with optical machines, certainly, but anything more technophilic than that is not necessary, and perhaps dangerous. voting is not a process that needs to be improved. the poorest country in the world and the richest should all vote the simple way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I would love to see that in place everywhere. It would force people to actually think about who they're voting for instead of blindly voting down party lines.
You mean it would force the parties to hand out cheat-sheets with the names of all their candidates, and the losing party to complain loudly about discrimination via a poll literacy test.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I am so glad someone stepped in to say what you said. These lever machines have been here forever, and every time this comes up, I write my reps and let them know that I don't want any newfangled, failure-prone computers to vote with. The inspectors where I am are professional, quick, and helpful. The tallies come out quick. We don't have to worry about a power outage. Oh, I suppose there are ways to sabotage the machines, but I imagine doing so without being obvious would be tough.
Anyway, I am so scared that they will take them away from us. Another working tradition ruined to fatten someone's wallet at the expense of simplicity and reliability.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
In Canada, most of the people manning the polls are young. We pay a lot of money for poll staff; the spots go quickly once an election has been called.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?