Following the lead of Dutchess County, in February both the Ulster County Legislature and the Columbia County Board of Supervisors passed resolutions authorizing their county governments to formally urge or request respectively that the "New York State Legislature and The New York State Board of Elections enact laws, rules and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines." The Ulster resolution was passed unanimously and the Columbia resolution passed with only one dissenting vote.
The Kingston Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has also taken a position advocating for the retention of levers in New York. Although they had previously been concerned about being at odds with the League of Women Voters of NY over their position in favor of optical scanners over levers, an article by Teresa Hommel, who worked to write the LWV national position in 2006 clarified for the group that the LWV standards were never intended to apply to non-electronic voting machines and therefore should not be construed as a position in opposition to lever machines. A poll of the AAUW Kingston membership revealed that over 90% of the respondents thought that the group should work to help retain the lever voting machines.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Only a Transparent Vote-Counting System Can Protect Democracy
Click here for the PDF version of this article.
Democracy (demos = people, kratos = rule) requires that all citizens have equal access to power. In order for citizens to retain control over government created for their benefit, regular people must be able to observe, understand and safeguard every aspect of the process by which government is chosen. In New York, both our manual paper ballot and lever-count voting system have provided full transparency, enabling the election results to be 100% knowable.
Currently, throughout the State, over 327,000 election officials and watchers collectively witness the vote counting process from the moment error or fraud can intervene, until the count is completed. That count must be verified and concluded on election night. The reason for this is election security. For as long as we've been a state, New York has forbidden post-election recounts of paper ballots because experience teaches that once the ballots leave the public view, the possibilities for fraud are too great to sufficiently prevent.
Professor Bryan Pfaffenberger, who received a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation to study the history of lever voting machines, wrote:
Paper ballot elections counted by software-driven optical scanners are the opposite of what democracy demands. The software invisibly tabulates the votes so that none of the 327,000 New Yorkers who currently safeguard the process can see how the scanner’s been programmed to count -- nor how it in fact did count.
Certifying the software system does not make concealed vote counting secure. This is the assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – the same experts who advise the US Election Assistance Commission on the writing of the very federal voting system standards to which New York is trying to adhere! NIST has already rejected certification as the panacea the State Board of Elections, NYVV and LWV are representing it will be, finding that:
"[T]esting to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible."
It is solely because the software-based voting machines are so deficient, that New York is following a path that ignores the lessons of its history by relying on post-election audits and recounts of paper ballots that are also vulnerable to tampering. Only a state already saddled with concealed software-based vote counting should need to resort to post-election hand counts. We in New York are indeed fortunate to have a superior system that doesn't necessitate a paper trail in an effort to ascertain whether the lever machine's results were wrong because the machine had been undetectably rigged, or misprogrammed, or had simply erred in some unobservable way. Everything about the lever machine's functioning is visible and within our control. The immutable operation of the lever machine enables us to observe, before the election, that it has been properly programmed to count votes, and, after the election, how it counted the votes that were cast upon it. Inferior software technology makes all of this unobservable.
This ability to be able to detect and observe error or tampering is essential to protecting the constitutionally guaranteed franchise, as demonstrated by State Board of Elections Commissioner Kellner's explanation of how New York’s lever system successfully prevailed in a scandal in the 1940s:
HAVA did not require the replacement of our levers. Section 301(a)(1)(A) expressly states that so long as: “the voting system (including any lever voting system, optical scanning voting system, or direct recording electronic system) shall...” comply with five federal standards, the system is HAVA-compliant. As Commissioner Kellner testified, "Our lever machines satisfy all but one of those standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is ‘accessible for individuals with disabilities.’"
New York added accessible ballot marking devices (BMDs) to its lever voting system in 2008, resulting in a HAVA-compliant voting system. However, as the well respected election integrity organization, Voters Unite, has noted: today’s accessible voting machines have failed to fulfill the promise of HAVA across the nation. We must now strive to improve New York’s accessible devices so they truly enable citizens with special needs to vote independently. By retaining our lever voting system, augmented with non-tabulating BMDs and election night hand counts of accessible paper ballots, New York can continue to have the best of both worlds. And the most affordable.
Democracy (demos = people, kratos = rule) requires that all citizens have equal access to power. In order for citizens to retain control over government created for their benefit, regular people must be able to observe, understand and safeguard every aspect of the process by which government is chosen. In New York, both our manual paper ballot and lever-count voting system have provided full transparency, enabling the election results to be 100% knowable.
Currently, throughout the State, over 327,000 election officials and watchers collectively witness the vote counting process from the moment error or fraud can intervene, until the count is completed. That count must be verified and concluded on election night. The reason for this is election security. For as long as we've been a state, New York has forbidden post-election recounts of paper ballots because experience teaches that once the ballots leave the public view, the possibilities for fraud are too great to sufficiently prevent.
Professor Bryan Pfaffenberger, who received a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation to study the history of lever voting machines, wrote:
In my analysis, the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure. .... Today, there are widespread calls to bring paper back into the picture, but the reason is that people do not trust the [new] machines. ....It is New York’s history of election fraud that required paper ballots to be counted openly and publicly in order to best deter such fraud. If we are to return to a paper ballot system, we must count the ballots openly and publicly -- and not adjourn until the count is completed. Our history and our constitutional system of government require no less. If we are to use machines to count our votes, then the way the machine is programmed to count must be open and observable before and after the election -- and must not be subject to change during the election. Only the immutable operation of the lever machine permits this transparency and reliability.
Having studied the history, I strongly believe that there would be no such call for paper if the ugly history of fraudulent practices enabled by paper ballots were known. .... In New York, the people, in their wisdom, created a system of election administration AND a technology that solved the characteristic problems of American elections; to abandon lever machines for new technologies that will not gain voter confidence and, at the same time, re-introduce paper audit trails or paper ballots which have long proven to be prone to election fraud, amounts in my opinion to a potentially disastrous mistake.
Paper ballot elections counted by software-driven optical scanners are the opposite of what democracy demands. The software invisibly tabulates the votes so that none of the 327,000 New Yorkers who currently safeguard the process can see how the scanner’s been programmed to count -- nor how it in fact did count.
Certifying the software system does not make concealed vote counting secure. This is the assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – the same experts who advise the US Election Assistance Commission on the writing of the very federal voting system standards to which New York is trying to adhere! NIST has already rejected certification as the panacea the State Board of Elections, NYVV and LWV are representing it will be, finding that:
"[T]esting to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible."
It is solely because the software-based voting machines are so deficient, that New York is following a path that ignores the lessons of its history by relying on post-election audits and recounts of paper ballots that are also vulnerable to tampering. Only a state already saddled with concealed software-based vote counting should need to resort to post-election hand counts. We in New York are indeed fortunate to have a superior system that doesn't necessitate a paper trail in an effort to ascertain whether the lever machine's results were wrong because the machine had been undetectably rigged, or misprogrammed, or had simply erred in some unobservable way. Everything about the lever machine's functioning is visible and within our control. The immutable operation of the lever machine enables us to observe, before the election, that it has been properly programmed to count votes, and, after the election, how it counted the votes that were cast upon it. Inferior software technology makes all of this unobservable.
This ability to be able to detect and observe error or tampering is essential to protecting the constitutionally guaranteed franchise, as demonstrated by State Board of Elections Commissioner Kellner's explanation of how New York’s lever system successfully prevailed in a scandal in the 1940s:
The fraud of the 1940s was uncovered because volunteers from the polling stations noticed that the numbers on their machines at the counting location were not the same as when they left the polling station. Similarly, any tampering with a lever machine today would be plainly visible to the volunteer preparing it for poll opening. Becoming aware of fraud on an e-voting machine would be much more difficult, because so much of their inner-workings are invisible to all but the software programmers.We must fight to preserve our superior and democracy-compliant technology, which combined with New York's Election Laws mandating that regular people be able to detect and deter fraud, provides us with the most secure voting system in America.
Fighting fraud carried out by code is also particularly expensive. Some e-voting systems run on 150,000 lines of code and to uncover whether fraud has occurred, or by whom and how, requires an army of programmers, a number of years, and millions of dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that their examination will produce results.
HAVA did not require the replacement of our levers. Section 301(a)(1)(A) expressly states that so long as: “the voting system (including any lever voting system, optical scanning voting system, or direct recording electronic system) shall...” comply with five federal standards, the system is HAVA-compliant. As Commissioner Kellner testified, "Our lever machines satisfy all but one of those standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is ‘accessible for individuals with disabilities.’"
New York added accessible ballot marking devices (BMDs) to its lever voting system in 2008, resulting in a HAVA-compliant voting system. However, as the well respected election integrity organization, Voters Unite, has noted: today’s accessible voting machines have failed to fulfill the promise of HAVA across the nation. We must now strive to improve New York’s accessible devices so they truly enable citizens with special needs to vote independently. By retaining our lever voting system, augmented with non-tabulating BMDs and election night hand counts of accessible paper ballots, New York can continue to have the best of both worlds. And the most affordable.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Give Me A Lever And A Place to Stand
"Archimedes asked only for a lever and a place to stand, and he would move the world." -- John Mason, Hudson-Catskill Newspapers
Please forward this to every New Yorker you communicate with -- Conservative, Liberal, Green, Independent, Republicans, Working Families, Democrats, etc. All have one thing in common:We want our votes to be counted.
New York has the last transparent, secure, accurate and reliable electoral system left in the nation. Join citizens, county legislators, county election commissioners and political parties in saving our lever voting system!
Here's how:
Here's how:
3) Donate to our efforts on the blog site & contact Joanne@re-mediaetc.org to volunteer some time to Save Our Lever Voting System.
4. Finally, please read and circulate this excellent article about Columbia County's efforts by John Mason in the Hudson-Catskill Newspapers:
County may petition to stick with levers
As Mason so aptly notes, "Archimedes asked only for a lever and a place to stand, and he would move the world."
You can read more about what it takes to run a truly transparent election system like New York's here:
Executive Summary (PDF)
Long Version (PDF)
Thanks for taking the time to help!
Andi Novick, Esq.
Founder, Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition
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