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."

Comments

Where's the money behind this?

[CodeShark]

My question is, why would the DOJ be pushing unless there was a monied interest (Diebold, etc.) pushing behind the scenes. Because -- though I am traditionally a Republican in terms of most voting patterns, neither the Clinton nor Bush White House regimes ever seemed to be truly interested in battling corporate co-opting and corruption of the American political processes.

Like others, though, I think that SCOTUS will prevail, because ultimately if the federal government becomes overpoweringly strong, there may be a second secessionary movement where many of the states tell the currently empowered federal government to go to hell and start over.

Re:Electric voting machines not reliable?

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

I, too, vote in NY and use the mechanical lever machines. The primary problems I've seen from them is that they are prone to mechanical failure (Don Alhart, a local tv anchor, broke the machine he used Tuesday) and that there is no way to separate votes are potentially corrupted.

In the case of the former, all machines run the risk of breaking down, be they mechanical, electronic or even pencil and paper (run out of ballots, pencils, etc)... 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.

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? 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. I'm not sure there's a good solution to that (but, again, every voting system, short of tying your identification to your vote, is prone to that).

Basically, I trust the lever machines more than I would touch screen voting... and you can't screw up your voting, the machine, mechanically, won't let you overvote. I could accept optically scanning a paper ballot as a viable change if we really must.

Diabold No parties listed.

[jshriverWVU]

Last week I voted and noticed something really odd. It never listed parties. WTF, granted you should really know who you are going to vote for, but how many people really know about council people and just vote a straight ticket for their party. It shocked me.

Time for an open source initiative

[jhfry]

I think it's time for someone with some experience managing open source projects, and a significant bank roll, to start a fully open source voting machine initiative.

I mean open hardware, open software, open everything.

I am pretty certain that the open community could devise something that would be nearly tamper proof... probably using two devices. One, managed by the voting officials in the district that actually records the votes, the second is managed by a 3rd party and is used to verify the results.

For example I vote on one machine, which prints a verification slip that is scanned into the second which display and records my votes. At the end of the day, both machines should have the same count... otherwise one of the two was tampered with. At which point they turn to the verification slips for a manual count.

Re:Electric voting machines not reliable?

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

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. It doesn't always quite work out that way in practice though. There are usually 3-4 people working when I go to the polls, so I haven't seen it personally, but I've had friends go vote and find only one person staffing the poll at that time (I don't know where the others were, out to lunch, bathroom, whatever).

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 will also attest to that. In the 12 years that I've been voting, I've never seen a poll worker under 50. Maybe 25% of the time, there will be someone who is of non-retirement age.

I've seen districts fall apart during primary elections with depressingly low turnout Primaries and school elections seem prone to poor turnouts. The only time I've ever seen a massive primary turnout was in 2005 when we had a town supervisor seat nomination that was hotly contested. Nearly 1000 people crammed into the high school gym (reference, tuesday's general election had about 700 people vote total). My town is a one party town by a margin of about 5-1 so whoever wins the primary of that party pretty much is guaranteed to win the general election too (actually, it's like that in the nearest city too... if you aren't a certain party, you flat out can't get elected for any reason, even if that party's candidate were Osama bin Laden and you are (insert saintly person of your choice)). Bonus points when the nominee for that one party picks up the nomination of the other party too, in order to make sure he runs uncontested (even though that other party didn't bother to put up a candidate in 5 of the 6 local races this year).

Re:Electric voting machines not reliable?

[Shakrai]

IAANYSIOE (I am a New York State Inspector of Elections)

That is, of course, assuming that the machine is working correctly and hasn't been tampered with

The machine is sealed against tampering with numbered seals as well as protective and public counters. We verify all of this information in the morning before we open the polls. This is one of the reasons that we have to be there at 5:30AM even though the polls don't open until 6:00AM. Once the polls close we re-seal the machine and document the seal number, public and protective counter numbers, etc, etc.

or that election workers aren't deliberately reporting false numbers.

There are checks and balances in place to prevent this:

1. The Election Law mandates that you have at least one election worker from each major party present at the polling place at all times. "Major Party" is defined in NYS Law as the two parties that had the highest and second highest number of votes in the last gubernatorial election, so in theory it need not be the Democrats and Republicans.
2. The Election Inspectors are only provided with the keys to open and close the machine for voting. We don't have the keys required to open up the machine to re-program the ballot or zero the counters.
3. The machine has two counters. A protective counter (the total number of votes ever cast on the machine) and a public counter (number of votes cast that day). The public counter needs to match the number of people that signed the poll book. The signatures in the poll book are all verified. There is no way for us to cast extra votes without the tampering being discovered.
4. Lastly, when we canvass the vote at the end of the night and call in the results, those are the unofficial results. The official certified results happen when the Board of Elections opens up the machine several weeks after the election and verifies the counts match what we provided on election night.

I find it amusing that opponents of e-voting are so skeptical of the system's integrity, yet seem to have no similar concerns about the old methods.

The difference between the new methods and the old methods is that almost anybody can verify the integrity of the lever machines. You can't tamper with it and have votes go to another candidate because the machine isn't that smart -- each candidate has a counter that is mechanically linked to the lever. The Board of Elections can open up the machine and visually verify that each lever is attached to the correct counter. The inspectors at the polling place can verify that the ballot on the machine matches the ballot for the polling place.

Contrast that to a software based system. Now you need somebody with computer and coding skills to verify the software on the machine. Even open source software isn't a perfect solution here, because there is no way for the inspectors at the polling place to verify that the software on the machine hasn't been tampered with after it left the Board of Elections.

Re:Electric voting machines not reliable?

[snoogans126]

Thanks of the information, I'm a life-long New Yorker and was actually considering volunteering (I can't imagine what's going to happen to the 80 somethings when the machines are gone) but haven't actually done the legwork of researching what's involved.

Since you've offered to answer questions, I'll offer a couple. I'm registered as an independent, I typically lean Democrat on most issues, but prefer not to "belong" to anyone's party. Would I still be useful as an independent, as most things seem to require at least one Democrat and one Republican? Do you generally work in the district where you vote, or are you specifically assigned another district, or do you just get assigned where needed? If you work in another district, do you have to vote absentee? (My understanding is that volunteers work the whole day, but let me know if I'm wrong on that account as well.)

My sincere thanks in advance for your time.