THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: VOTING RIGHTS DIVISION
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NEW YORK STATE'S ELECTORAL SYSTEM
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THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
Where Are the People and Who Are Elections for Anyway?
The Federal Government's problem: The Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act (HAVA) aims for every state to use computerized voting systems which have been repeatedly shown to be vulnerable-to-hacking and hence deprive the electorate of their once constitutionally protected right to vote. New York is the last state to have submitted to federal government's plan, having not yet switched from its lever machines to a manipulable computerized system. The Department of Justice (DOJ) needs to be able to control NY now that its looking more and more like a battleground state with Clinton and Giuliani going head to head. This past Election Day the DOJ moved in federal court to force New York to get with the plan and be HAVA-compliant for the 2008 election.
New York State Government's problem: The State Board of Elections (SBOE), the Legislators, the Governor, the Attorney General (AG), the county election commissioners, etc. also want New Yorkers to vote on vulnerable-to-hacking electronic voting computers programmed by private vendors using secret proprietary software: they just want the computers to be certified for use by New York - which is not possible because there are no machines on the market which can or should pass testing certification: THERE ARE NO COMPUTERIZED VOTING SYSTEMS WHICH AREN'T CAPABLE OF BEING RIGGED WITHOUT DETECTION: NOT TOUCH-SCREEN DREs AND NOT OPTICAL SCANNERS. New York State has passed laws which require that voting machines comply with some stringent technological requirements and further requires that the voting vendors, who program their machines to process and count our votes in secret, let a few members of state government in on the secret --so long as they agree to never tell the people how the private corporations are secretly counting our votes.
New York State government believes, incorrectly, that by testing these machines and being allowed to look at the secret source coding, it can provide New Yorkers with a reliable, secure electoral system, albeit not very transparent to the citizens so how would we know just how reliable this system is. No matter how much of our taxpayer's dollars they spend on testing, the irrefutable fact remains: THERE ARE NO COMPUTERIZED VOTING SYSTEMS WHICH AREN'T CAPABLE OF BEING RIGGED WITHOUT DETECTION: NOT TOUCH-SCREEN DREs AND NOT OPTICAL SCANNERS. How do we know? These are the findings of the Secretary of State (SOS) of California California: http://tinyurl.com/yv7aaj. There's also Florida: http://tinyurl.com/2xkzd4 & Connecticut: http://tinyurl.com/3ycu47 in the past year and for a compilation of prior studies see: http://tinyurl.com/2gwlve
The rub: NY took $50 million dollars from the feds to fork over to the voting vendors as partial payment towards their corruptible voting systems. The DOJ has said now that in order for New York to be HAVA-compliant by 2008, the state should take the money it was given to turn over to the vendors and purchase any old computerized voting machine sold by the handful of irresponsible vendors peddling their corruptible defective product, by-passing NY's testing certification laws. In addition Microsoft, whose product the vendors rely on, won't let even a couple of guys in the government in on the big secret, insisting that the State by-pass its laws and accept the secret vote counting by the corporations. The DOJ said-- sounds good to them-- so NY forget your wanting to look at what Microsoft doesn't want you to look at.
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