We are still voting on our lever machines, at least through the 2008 election. THIS SHIP HAS NOT SAILED. Will Commissioner Kellner do what he said he’d do at the 6/19 SBOE meeting?
“I'm prepared to go back to Judge Sharp and to say: Judge, it would be unconstitutional to enforce the Help America Vote Act by requiring us to replace the lever voting machines with scanning equipment or DRE equipment or any equipment that does not comply with the current guidelines.”
Or will he and his colleagues continue to spend our money seeking to certify the reliability of machines that will never be reliable enough for an open, secure, democratic election.
3) The Good Citizens of New York
Ask most New Yorkers and they’ll tell you they are happy with their levers. That means for the most part they trust the results or they would not be happy with this system. They have good reason to trust the lever voting system and no reason to trust the computerized voting system the State plans on using to disenfranchise us.
But there are some who do not support the levers- many of them are election activists who believe having a paper ballot is better regardless of how it’s counted: even if it’s counted on undetectably mutable software. Their argument: we know the optical scanners can be rigged without ever being detected, but we can hand-count some of the ballots to check against the computer results. It’s true- we can do that, but we’re not. And even if we were- why would we settle for an electoral system that is so insecure it requires us to vote on hackable software to deliver an unreliable result on election night, only to check that unknowable tally after the election, after the press has announced the winner, after the ongoing surveillance of the poll site has ended, when the opportunity for tampering with those paper ballots is at its highest.
In other words the new electoral system the State has designed forces us to vote on software that may very well have been tampered with and then checks by counting only a small fraction of the paper ballots that might have been tampered!
Is that better than a lever voting system? Well, those opposed to levers and in favor of optical scan software will say- if the lever machine fails or is tampered with there’s no trace of how the voter voted. That’s true too, but it’s not like optical scanners solve that problem. It’s not like we’re checking the unseen tabulations of the optical scanner by doing an immediate hand-count of the paper ballots on election night, before they leave the poll site to be exposed to the potential for tampering – before those ballots are changed leaving no trace of how the voter actually voted.
Levers vs Optical Scanners
The lever voting machine:
· Is difficult to tamper with (as opposed to the ease of tampering with software);
· Can function well without the large numbers of failures we see with software (and for hundreds of years if properly maintained- won’t need to be continually upgraded like the way software is designed); and
· Is mechanically transparent (unlike software which is not knowable by regular people and even the few experts who get to see some of the source code, aren’t allowed to tell us what they find because the State has agreed to surrender the public’s right to know to the vendor’s desire to hide the way in which the software is programmed).
· If tampered with (although it’s time-consuming to break into a lever), the limited number of votes on a single lever machine are compromised, containing the scale of the fraud. (as compared to software where a single person with access to a single computer can infect every voting machine in the county); and
· Reveals error or fraud, visible upon opening the back of the machine – regular citizens can be readily taught to see the problem (unlike computerized voting systems which conceal errors or fraud amid the hundreds of thousands of lines of software code, or by allowing malicious code to disappear, and which error or fraud can never be seen by regular people);
· Was designed and in fact functions to deter theft (unlike computerized voting machines that enable theft on levels never before possible in American democracy).
At the end of the day, given that for the history of our elections insider fraud has played such a prominent role, the lever voting machine along with the safeguards New York has in place, have succeeded where no other voting machine has-- deterring fraud and best preserving the will of the people.
New York’s Legislature, Supported by the Attorney General, Sold Our Souls (SOS): Levers Are HAVA-compliant Now That We Are Installing Ballot Marking Devices in Every Poll Site
Testifying before the NYC Voter Assistance Commission in 2004, before the State agreed to install BMDs in every poll site, Commissioner Kellner attested to the lever voting machines’ compliance with HAVA.
“I'm prepared to go back to Judge Sharp and to say: Judge, it would be unconstitutional to enforce the Help America Vote Act by requiring us to replace the lever voting machines with scanning equipment or DRE equipment or any equipment that does not comply with the current guidelines.”
Or will he and his colleagues continue to spend our money seeking to certify the reliability of machines that will never be reliable enough for an open, secure, democratic election.
3) The Good Citizens of New York
Ask most New Yorkers and they’ll tell you they are happy with their levers. That means for the most part they trust the results or they would not be happy with this system. They have good reason to trust the lever voting system and no reason to trust the computerized voting system the State plans on using to disenfranchise us.
In other words the new electoral system the State has designed forces us to vote on software that may very well have been tampered with and then checks by counting only a small fraction of the paper ballots that might have been tampered!
Is that better than a lever voting system? Well, those opposed to levers and in favor of optical scan software will say- if the lever machine fails or is tampered with there’s no trace of how the voter voted. That’s true too, but it’s not like optical scanners solve that problem. It’s not like we’re checking the unseen tabulations of the optical scanner by doing an immediate hand-count of the paper ballots on election night, before they leave the poll site to be exposed to the potential for tampering – before those ballots are changed leaving no trace of how the voter actually voted.
Levers vs Optical Scanners
The lever voting machine:
· Is difficult to tamper with (as opposed to the ease of tampering with software);
· Can function well without the large numbers of failures we see with software (and for hundreds of years if properly maintained- won’t need to be continually upgraded like the way software is designed); and
· Is mechanically transparent (unlike software which is not knowable by regular people and even the few experts who get to see some of the source code, aren’t allowed to tell us what they find because the State has agreed to surrender the public’s right to know to the vendor’s desire to hide the way in which the software is programmed).
· If tampered with (although it’s time-consuming to break into a lever), the limited number of votes on a single lever machine are compromised, containing the scale of the fraud. (as compared to software where a single person with access to a single computer can infect every voting machine in the county); and
· Reveals error or fraud, visible upon opening the back of the machine – regular citizens can be readily taught to see the problem (unlike computerized voting systems which conceal errors or fraud amid the hundreds of thousands of lines of software code, or by allowing malicious code to disappear, and which error or fraud can never be seen by regular people);
· Was designed and in fact functions to deter theft (unlike computerized voting machines that enable theft on levels never before possible in American democracy).
At the end of the day, given that for the history of our elections insider fraud has played such a prominent role, the lever voting machine along with the safeguards New York has in place, have succeeded where no other voting machine has-- deterring fraud and best preserving the will of the people.
New York’s Legislature, Supported by the Attorney General, Sold Our Souls (SOS): Levers Are HAVA-compliant Now That We Are Installing Ballot Marking Devices in Every Poll Site
Testifying before the NYC Voter Assistance Commission in 2004, before the State agreed to install BMDs in every poll site, Commissioner Kellner attested to the lever voting machines’ compliance with HAVA.
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