It is true as Avante’s VP states, that there is a dispute at the SBOE over how much source coding needs to be escrowed, but to argue that therefore nothing should be escrowed is not only contemptuous of its responsibility to comply with the law in New York, but exposes Avante’s argument for what it is: self-serving and disingenuous. Equally deceitful is Avante’s claim that “It is not possible to design new equipment with new operating systems, new EMS …… in less than a couple of years. And that is, if the vendors wanted to do this.” If New York chose an open source code optical scan system, we’d have a voting system in place tomorrow, not two years from now. What Avante claims is impossible to create actually already exists.
Trust us, Avante concludes because “Vendors voting equipment has been proven worthy around the country.” Really? One needs only look at the extensive evidence of faulty equipment, excessive breakdowns, tampering, vote flipping, mysterious under votes (voters who wait on line to cast votes for the minor races, but strangely decide not to cast a vote in the major races), impossible tabulations like phantom voters (precincts where thousands vote for a particular candidate, but only hundreds are actually registered to vote in that precinct), the list of voting equipment unworthiness is long, see for eg. http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp?sort=date&selectstate=ALL&selectvendor=&selectproblemtype=Machine+malfunction.
Perhaps it is Avante’s closing line, in arguing that New York should change its law so as to eliminate any escrow requirement (such that New York could never know how the computers were programmed to count the votes) that is the most honest and revealing of Avante’s claims. Avante’s VP writes: “The point of changing the law is to allow NY to certify new equipment. The current law makes that impossible. There is no intent to reduce the integrity of the vote.” Well the Law was not written for the Avantes of the world merely to permit them to certify the machines using secret proprietary software. To the contrary, the Law was written for the citizens of New York so that we would not be forced to rely on private vendors to let us know how their computers counted our votes, with no way for us to see how those machines were programmed.
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