Election Transparency Coalition

NY Assembly District 100: Every Vote Not Counted

2011-02-22T14:14:00.002-05:00

"We've been taught in schools that every vote counts - and obviously, in this case, every vote did not." - NY Assembly candidate Frank Skartados

We recommend the account of the race for NY Assembly in district 100 as related in yesterday's Daily News under the headline Dem Frank Skartados doomed by vague election law crafted by his own lawyer. One of the rationales used by op-scan proponents has been that in close or questionable elections the paper ballots could always be recounted by hand. Yet for the second time this year in a close and politically crucial race an election was certified without re-examining the paper ballots counted by op-scan, although in the end a mere 15 votes separated the two candidates. See the story here and below:

Dem Frank Skartados doomed by vague election law crafted by his own lawyer

Celeste Katz

Monday, February 21st 2011, 4:00 AM

Albany Times Union

Frank Skartados was forced to concede the seat for the 100th Assembly District last week when he was a mere 15 votes behind.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's former adviser wrote the state law that may have cost him his powerful, veto-proof, Democratic supermajority.

Democrat Frank Skartados was forced to concede the seat for the 100th Assembly District last week when he was a mere 15 votes behind.

In his heart of hearts, he believes he won.

But in a double whammy of irony, Skartados was seemingly doomed by a vague election law that was crafted by his own lawyer, Kathleen O'Keefe, while she worked as Silver's chief election counsel. O'Keefe's strict interpretation of her own law walled off one of Skartados' last hopes of fighting for the seat.

"I couldn't do anything with the way the law was written," said Skartados, who conceded to Republican Tom Kirwan after one of the most drawnout contests in state history. "But I feel that justice was not served because the voices of everyone were silenced by the courts."

A Brooklyn appeals court ruled unanimously in favor of Kirwan when it tossed out about 60 contested affidavit ballots. That left Skartados just 15 votes behind. In New York City, Board of Elections rules automatically require a hand inspection of the paper trail from voting machines in any election where the margin is 0.5% or less.

State election law doesn't - and in races as close as the one for this Hudson Valley seat, it could make all the difference. "New York law offers very little guidance as to when a full recount is required," elections law expert Jerry Goldfeder said. "The law needs to be clarified."

It's Monday morning quarterbacking, but what if Team Skartados had chosen to do something it never did: push for the machines to be opened?

Take this example:

Mr. and Mrs. Public vote in a state Senate race. Mr. Public goes to the polls; Mrs. Public mails an absentee ballot. Being of like mind, they both choose Candidate Z. They also make the same error: Both circle Z's name instead of properly filling in the oval on the ballot.

Mr. Public feeds his ballot into the voting machine, which scans the blank oval and counts it as an "undervote," or no vote in that race.

Mrs. Public's absentee ballot is opened, and election officials - who are required to consider the voter's intent - mark down a vote for Z. Mrs. Public's vote is counted. But if the machines stay closed, Mr. Public's vote disappears.

O'Keefe, reached yesterday, headed off any questions. "I have no comment, [and] I'd rather you didn't call me," she said before hanging up. Silver did not return a call.

Even Kirwan's lawyer James Walsh - though thrilled with his client's victory - said he would have interpreted the law differently if he'd been in O'Keefe's place in the 100-day-plus struggle.

"If I were her, I would've [tried to] open up all the machines - especially [in] Dutchess County," with its higher concentration of registered Democrats.

It's certainly true - and Skartados readily agrees - that if the machine paper were hand-counted, he still might have lost.

We'll never know.

"I don't feel any justice in this election," he said. "We've been taught in schools that every vote counts - and obviously, in this case, every vote did not."

ckatz@nydailynews.com

OpEd News Interview With ETC's Joanne Lukacher

2011-01-23T16:48:00.002-05:00

Joanne Lukacher, ETC advisory board director, discussed recent and ongoing developments in New York's experiences with computerized voting with Joan Brunwasser of OpEd News here .

Joanne Lukacher and Howard Stanislevic Interviewed on Activist Radio

2011-01-12T02:15:00.008-05:00

"We were...assured...by one of our State Election Commissioners that the paper ballot count would be the certified count -- not the machine count.

"Now...a tightly contested election...has been certified, but the paper ballots were not the deciding factor."

-- Joanne Lukacher -- Election Transparency Coalition

On January 7th, ETC project director Joanne Lukacher and ETC adviser Howard Stanislevic of the E-Voter Education Project were the guests of WVKR radio hosts Fred Nagel and Gary Kenton on their program: Activist Radio. Fred is an active peace and justice advocate and Gary served on the Dutchess County Voting Integrity Task Force which delivered the report leading to the Dutchess County legislature becoming the first county legislature in New York to pass a resolution in favor of retaining their lever voting machines. The conversation covered: Columbia County's 100% hand count; the request for a hand count of the NY Senate District 7 contest denied by the state's highest court; the ongoing Nassau County lawsuit against electronic vote counting; and more. A podcast of the discussion is available here as a free mp3 download.

New York Primary Election Day: Op-Scan Round-up

2010-09-19T14:45:00.003-04:00

Tuesday was primary election day in New York and the debut of optical scan voting machines in all New York counties. Reports from voters around the state were fairly consistent with my own experience in Poughkeepsie.

Although there were only about 4 people in line it took me about 10 minutes to get my ballot. One minute to fill it out - not as easy to stay inside those ovals as when seated at a desk with a pencil in the 10th grade, but I had only two choices to indicate. The markers were micron felt-tip and already the point was wearing down although I'm sure there had been no more than 15 voters there so far. A report from an ETC friend in Suffolk County indicated that although she was the 39th voter in her district, the pen was almost out of ink.

At my polling place only one of the two machines was working. I saw reams of machine tapes being pulled out and there was also some dispute as to whether each machine was dedicated exclusively to one of the two election districts accommodated by this polling place. When I inserted my ballot into the working op-scan I received an over-vote notice and chose to have the ballot returned rather then continuing since I knew I had not over-voted. I inserted the ballot again only to received a "one or more ambiguous marks" on the ballot notice and indeed there were very faint and very tiny smudges either from the privacy sleeve or the scanner itself. Voters in New York city apparently had the same problem, the result of the use of the felt-tip markers which were reported to be those recommended by the voting machine manufacturers.

In Poughkeepsie I stood in line again for a new ballot and carefully filled in those minute ovals, although now the pen had a felt tail dragging behind. After 2 more attempts this new ballot with no evident "ambiguous" marks was again being rejected on the grounds of those invisible ambiguities. Throughout the state there were reports of machines rejecting ballots. In the time I was at my polling place at least one person had to feed his ballot at least twice before it registered. Finally the attendant at my machine suggested I turned the ballot over with the blank side up and, ta-dah, my vote was "cast" indicating I was the 22nd voter of the day.

I know the scanners have the capability to read two sides but whether that feature was enabled today? Who knows? But then again, who knows anyway?

With the high percentage of rejected ballots, I was concerned that the spoiled ballots were not being as carefully tracked as they should have been. Again, during the 25 minutes I was at my relatively quiet polling place another voter (an experienced poll worker) over-voted and had to stand in line for a new ballot. I later saw her hand in her spoilt ballot only after her second ballot had been cast. At one point in one election district in Syracuse there were 14 ballots spoiled for 20 which had been cast.

Nassau County Argues for Lever Machines in US Court of Appeals

2010-09-03T03:03:00.006-04:00

On Wednesday, Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli asked a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to overrule District Court Judge Gary Sharpe's order to replace lever voting machines with computers to run this year's federal elections in New York.

Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs reportedly agreed with the county's assesment, saying that the new computerized ballot scanners were "more prone to fraud on a mass scale than a lever machine."

Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News Service attended the hearing in lower Manhattan on Sept. 1 and filed this report.

This is the highest court to hear a case on the use of lever voting machines in federal elections since the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which made funds available to the states to replace lever machines and punch cards, was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Nassau County continues to break new ground, making the arguments that should have been made by New York State attorneys in US v. NYS Board of Elections years ago. HAVA does not require the use of computers to count votes.

NY Court Allows Optical Scan Inspection by Nassau's Experts

2010-07-27T08:20:00.003-04:00

The state Supreme Court judge hearing Nassau County’s case against the NY State Board of Elections last week authorized Nassau County, as part of the discovery process, to have ES&S electronic vote-counting machines tested by an independent lab in Connecticut.

In delivering this order the judge affirmed many of the constitutional issues which ETC has articulated, finding that, among other things, “the Legislature may not adopt policies which deprive voters of crucial protections under the New York State Constitution,” and “any burden on the State is far outweighed by the public’s interest in the right to cast a meaningful vote and its right to know whether the new machines jeopardize the security and integrity of New York’s electoral process.”

Responding to the court ruling in a press statement, Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli said, “It is my firm belief that these new voting machines adversely affect voters… in their ability to cast their votes and have them count. In addition, in my opinion, the new voting equipment is an invitation to high tech and low tech fraud. Finally these voting systems will explode the cost of running elections by a multiple of as much as ten times the cost of running an election on our reliable lever machines.”

Nassau is among a minority of New York counties to have opted for the ES&S optical scan machines, one of two systems certified for use in NY by the State Board of Elections. The ruling only applies to the machines of the petitioning county (Nassau). This currently leaves the Dominion system, which was chosen by the majority of New York counties, exempt from independent testing.

Most of the twenty counties that passed resolutions expressing concerns about the optical scan voting systems and petitioning to retain their lever machines are scheduled to use Dominion Optical Scanners in fall elections. ETC urges these counties to join the Nassau suit so that all the voting machines will be subjected to independent professional scrutiny.

Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli’s press statement and the full court ruling can be read here: Nassau Discovery Ruling & Statement.

Brennan Center Sues NYSBOE over Seasoning in Poisonous Brew

2010-07-24T13:39:00.002-04:00

Note: This article is re-posted from our sister site http://electiontransparencycoalition.org and is commentary on a development that occurred while the ETC blog editor was on vacation.

Lawsuit Dishonors Justice Brennan’s Name

The Brennan Center For Justice has filed suit against the NY State and NYC Boards of Elections to prevent election officials from configuring newly purchased optical scan voting machines in a manner that would disfranchise large numbers of voters. The suit, filed on behalf of NAACP, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the Working Families Party and other plaintiffs, seeks to compel election officials to use procedures to prevent votes from being disqualified when a voter selects too many candidates in a particular race, known as “overvoting.”

Of course it is important to require procedures to prevent overvoting, but The Election Transparency Coalition (ETC) has repeatedly insisted that all protective procedures New York has enjoyed for centuries be maintained, including the opportunity for meaningful public oversight of our elections. The Brennan Center’s lawsuit, by focusing on a single protection, fails to address the much more significant problem: the State’s insistence that counties deploy concealed fraud-enabling vote-counting technology in the first place!

ETC maintains that the Brennan Center suit is akin to fretting over the seasoning in a poisonous brew. If the Brennan Center’s case succeeds, overvoting may be less likely to occur, but votes can still be nullified by the concealed vote counting system the Brennan Center supports!

While correctly pointing out that lever voting machines make overvoting impossible, the Brennan Center’s case fails to mention that lever machines also cannot be secretly programmed or “hacked” to switch and miscount votes without detection — which is eminently possible with optical scanners.

As ETC has been saying for years, electronic optical scan vote counting systems are vulnerable to tampering and malfunction that is completely undetectable. The way in which such voting machines were programmed to count, as well as how they in fact counted, is hidden, violating centuries of New York State election law mandating public oversight and accountability. That’s why we have been working so hard to bring our own lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of NY’s Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), which is forcing NY’s counties to replace their existing secure, transparent HAVA-compliant voting systems.

Nassau County has filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court similar to ETC’s upcoming suit and a federal judge has ruled that federal law does not require replacement of lever voting machines. Yet the Brennan Center’s case continues to promote the widely held misconception that the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandates replacement of NY’s trusted lever machines. The State of NY had also made this erroneous claim and argued that Nassau’s case must be tried in Federal Court. But last month, Federal Court Judge Joseph Bianco rejected the State’s arguments and remanded Nassau County’s suit back to State Court. As Nassau had argued, New York has been in compliance with HAVA since 2008, when the State augmented the lever voting system with ballot marking devices at every polling place to increase accessibility for voters with special needs.

The late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan understood the imperative for public scrutiny of government processes, repeatedly finding the public’s right to witness and safeguard its interest to be constitutionally protected.

The Brennan Center website quotes Justice Brennan as saying, “. . . the Constitution will endure as a vital charter of human liberty as long as there are those with the courage to defend it, the vision to interpret it, and the fidelity to live by it.”

The Election Transparency Coalition calls upon the Brennan Center to honor its namesake by challenging the dangers posed to our democracy by concealed vote-counting systems. ERMA must be declared unconstitutional so that transparency and citizen oversight can be returned to our elections and we can perform our duties as citizens to ensure that every vote will be counted correctly.

Nassau Election Commisssion Lawsuit Sent back to State Court

2010-06-23T13:42:00.009-04:00

We’re pleased with U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Bianco’s ruling last week sending Nassau County’s case back to state court where it belongs.

The case, filed in March, seeks to have NY’s Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) declared unconstitutional for many of the same reasons ETC’s upcoming litigation does: chiefly, the disaster that would be caused for our democracy should the electronic vote-counting systems ordered by ERMA be deployed throughout New York. Defendants had the case moved to federal court, claiming that federal issues were involved.

But Judge Bianco disagreed, saying “Plaintiffs’ claims (1) do not assert a federal cause of action, (2) necessarily raise a substantial question of federal law, or (3) come within the “artful pleading doctrine.” As such, there is no federal jurisdiction over this case, and remand is required.”

The State has repeatedly claimed that federal law, the Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act, forbids continued use of lever voting machines. However, in his ruling, Judge Bianco affirmed what Nassau (and ETC) have been saying: that HAVA does not rule out the use of lever voting machines.

Bianco’s ruling also states, “In short, there is no indication Congress sought to transform all state law claims dealing with the administration of elections or voting systems into federal claims. In fact, the opposite appears to be true given that Congress gave the states a significant amount of discretion as to how to implement HAVA.”

Judge Bianco’s ruling thus correlates with what ETC has said all along: that HAVA does not require that NY abandon its lever voting systems. NY came into compliance with HAVA when ballot marking devices were installed at every polling place to provide increased access for voters with special needs. The full ruling can be viewed here.

Nassau County Files Suit Against NYS Over ERMA

2010-03-26T18:34:00.002-04:00

The Election Transparency Coalition applauds Nassau County for filing suit against the State of New York over its unconstitutional election law, the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA).

ETC has long held that ERMA is unconstitutional because its mandate that counties switch over from the time-tested, trustworthy and transparent lever voting systems to electronic vote-counting systems will end meaningful public oversight of the public’s elections. That mandate must not be allowed to stand.

Since New York State has already complied with the federal requirement of at least one accessible voting device for voters with special needs at each poll site, we urge the Court to act quickly and decisively to halt the implementation of the state’s legislation before more taxpayer dollars are spent on equipment that must not be used to count votes in New York.

Columbia County Joins With Nassau to Contest ERMA: Counties Want to Keep Their Lever Voting Machines

2010-03-02T15:40:00.008-05:00

From the Columbia County Register Star:

By Francesca Olsen

Published:

Tuesday, March 2, 2010 2:12 AM EST

The Columbia County Board of Elections will join in a lawsuit with Nassau County, and other New York counties, to declare ERMA, the state Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, unconstitutional.

BOE Commissioners Virginia Martin (D) and Jason Nastke (R) have updated the Board of Supervisors’ County Government Committee on the impending litigation.

At February’s meeting, Nastke told the committee that the County Attorney’s Office has reviewed the lawsuit paperwork, and is on board with the idea, provided the BOE get “something in writing” from Nassau that there will be no financial or legal implications from joining the suit.

Under ERMA, traditional lever voting machines would be prohibited from use, and municipalities would have to replace them with computerized voting machines, either touch-screen or optical scanners. But ERMA doesn’t fund the replacement, meaning Columbia, and other New York counties, would need to foot the bill for the transition.

“My fundamental issue with this, aside from the reliability issue with the new machines, is essentially, the unfunded mandate costs being carried over to the county,” Nastke told the Register-Star. “Albany wants to talk a great deal about how we should save money, but then sends down mandates that will cost Columbia County alone $100,000 per election. It’s just wrong.”

“What’s not extricable from the cost issue is the complexity issue,” Martin added. “When things become more complex they become more costly to maintain or implement. There’s much more to do.”

For example, if elections do end up moving over completely to paper ballots, storing the ballots, printed for each registered voter, would require “Fort Knox” style security measures, including double locks and environmental controls. Machines would also need increased security.

Martin said that paper ballots used in elections now require the same kind of storage “but they comprise a very small portion of the votes that get cast. If we make the change to an election that’s fully voted on paper ballots, then we’re looking at a much greater storage space needed.”

“You have to print paper ballots for every voter, regardless of whether the voter shows up,” Nastke said. “What if there’s a last minute change on the ballot? Do we have to go out and reprint ballots?”

The Federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which inspired ERMA and requires municipalities to make voting accessible to everyone regardless of disability, does not require that lever machines be fully replaced, and provides funding to municipalities for the purchase of new machines.

In 2008, Columbia County complied with HAVA by purchasing 52 Sequoia Imagecast optical scan and ballot marking devices for $600,000, 95 percent of which was covered by HAVA funding. The county paid $28,000.

Martin said that while new machines probably wouldn’t need to be purchased, the cost would still be high.

“It’s not a matter of buying more machines. It’s a matter of implementing it all, which is far more complex than a lever machine election,” she said.

There have also been deep concerns across the state as to whether optical scanners are as reliable as lever machines. They are computerized, and doubts about the security and accuracy of programs have been raised repeatedly. Also concerning to many is that the computerized language of ones and zeroes can’t be easily understood at a local level by election custodians who may not be familiar with computer programming.

Resistance to the switch is ongoing. In February of last year, the New York State Association of Towns passed a resolution stating that “the continued use of lever voting machines is in the best interest of the public and should be permitted to be used in future general elections ... the elimination of lever voting machines is costly to taxpayers, will result in another burden upon the local taxpayers, and will be confusing to the voting public without adequate time and education.”

And the Election Transparency Coalition, headed by Attorney Andrea Novick, has been requesting help and resources to litigate against ERMA. ETC’s Web site, www.electiontransparencycoalition.org, declares pointedly that “ERMA is unconstitutional.”

“HAVA said we had to make voting handicapped-accessible to everybody,” Nastke said. “We’ve done that. The state of New York said, we want everyone to use these new machines. There’s nothing wrong with our old machines. They work fine. You know whether or not the votes were counted ... they don’t go into some hidden software chip somewhere.”

Followers of current events may already know that the Nassau County Attorney is John Ciampoli, the same attorney who litigated for the Columbia County Republican Party in a suit over the validity of absentee ballots from last November’s election.

Which means Martin and Ciampoli, who is involved in the litigation to declare ERMA unconstitutional, will be on the same side of the argument this time around.

“It seems that we do agree on this,” she said. “It’s good that Nassau is doing this, or is preparing to do this.”

Other counties in New York, Martin said, are looking into joining the litigation as well.

Ciampoli said that the BOE commissioners in Nassau County are calling other commissioners in other counties to generate interest in joining the lawsuit, and that so far, there have been talks with New York City, Westchester, Suffolk, and “several other counties.”

He added that paperwork has not been officially filed yet, but interviews with people to serve as expert witnesses are being conducted, an expert has already been retained, and reviews are being conducted with the attorney’s office and Board of Elections.

To reach reporter Francesca Olsen call 518-828-1616, ext. 2272, or e-mail folsen@registerstar.com.

"Auditing" Regs Confirm Op-Scan Vulnerabilities

2010-02-15T09:19:00.007-05:00

I need to reiterate: the crux of ETC's opposition to software-based voting systems, which include the Op-Scans, is that they institutionalize secret vote counting, violating our constitutional right to see that our votes are counted as cast.

Recognizing the inferiority and vulnerability of the op-scans the NYS Legislature in enacting ERMA included the requirement for an "audit", a post-election night recount of a percentage of supposedly randomly chosen paper ballots which the public was to believe was a check on the accuracy of the optical scanner counting. (Of course post-election night ballot recounts are illegal in New York, a fact that seems to be irrelevant to our officials.) But the so-called "auditing" procedures which have been developed by the state board of elections are themselves an indictment of the very proposition that software-based voting systems are an accurate and secure way to run an election.

The audit procedures are worth reading in full. But I have highlighted here what, if we could all still laugh about this, would be some of the more comical instances of doublespeak and oxymoron:

"Ballot Marks
o Valid votes that have been marked by the voter outside the vote targets or using a marking device that cannot be read by the vote tally system shall not be included in making the determination whether the voting system has met the standard of acceptable performance. "

What does this mean? Did the machine count the vote or not?

"Scanners will easily recognize votes that are marked with a density that is within the calibrated thresholds. In an audit, the human eye may perceive these marks differently that the scanner, however the audit team members and observers alike should understand that the scanners, in accordance with Section 7-201.1e provide each voter with a notification of any mark the system perceives as questionable and provides each voter with the opportunity to remark their ballot or cast it 'as-is'. "

In an audit the eye may perceive the mark differently? How did the voter who made the mark perceive it? Did the machine override voter intent? Silly voter.

"The problems in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 2004, where audit supervisors rigged the ballot selection so that no discrepancies would be found, exemplify the danger of auditors hoping to find perfect matches and to avoid the difficult questions and additional work that might result if the records do not match."

i.e. Beware of fraud. Two Cuyahoga County election workers were convicted for the illegal manipulation of ballots during the 2004 recount.

"To counter the understandable temptation to make the paper and electronic records match..."

Understandable, especially if you are trying to cover-up machine rigging or because underfunded, understaffed elections boards will often cut corners . Who could have imagined....And what is the counter to that? More expensive, finicky, non-transparent, easily compromised machines?

Manual counts may sometimes reveal different voter intent than machine counts of ballots. Overvotes, marginal marks, hesitation marks, and other stray markings on manually marked ballots could cause optical scan voting machines to misinterpret voter intent that a human reviewer would be able to discern."

... and if we make enough exceptions to cover discrepancies between hand and machine counts, then almost any machine, even rigged ones, will pass "audit."

- JL

Happy Valentines Day Lever Machines

2010-02-14T23:51:00.002-05:00

Mechanical Lever Voting Machines were first used in Lockport, New York in 1892. Four years later Rochester became the first large city to adopt the machines and the entire state soon followed.

On February 14th, 1899 voting machines were approved by Congress for use in federal elections.

Anniversary information courtesy of Sowing Culture the Blog of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS.) Photograph Courtesy of Connecticut History Online.

Voting machine, Hartford (CT, 1912)

All Things Considered: Electronic Voting Costs Dollars and Democracy

2010-02-10T12:50:00.005-05:00

So far the New York Board of Elections has not shown it can learn from the experiences of others that software-based voting not only creates unpredictable short and long term costs but endangers Democracy. The following report is from NPR Affiliate KXJZ in Sacrament0 and was aired on All Things Considered on February 8th and the following day on Morning Edition.

Thanks to votingnews.blogspot.com for the link.

(Sacramento, CA)

California elections officials say their computerized voting booths are in need of upgrades, but they can’t afford to make big improvements.

Capital Public Radio's Steve Shadley reports...

*******************************************************************************

Two statewide elections are coming up later this year but local elections officials say they’re working with outdated electronic voting booths.

Private companies that sell the equipment say the state and counties would be better off buying new systems rather than trying to modernize the old equipment.

That would require millions of dollars that governments don’t have right now.

At a public hearing on the issue in Sacramento, some citizens urged the officials to get rid of electronic voting, period.

Tom Courbat is with the Riverside County group “Save Our Vote”...

Courbat: “We’re not convinced there is enough security in these voting systems to justify continuing to purchase them. We have seen demonstrations over and over again of machines being hacked...”

Courbat says it would be more secure if voters cast paper ballots that would be counted by hand.

But advocates for the disabled say not everyone can fill out a paper ballot.

Note: Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) are one means by which special needs voters can create a ballot independently . BMDs are provided at every polling place in New York State. These BMDs are separate from the Optical Scan Voting Machines and the ballots created can be counted by hand. The issues should not be confused as they often are, including in the above report.

County Government Committee of Columbia County Supports Joining Litigation

2010-02-01T10:29:00.005-05:00

After a January 26th report on the state's required switch to optical scanners, presented by Columbia County Election Commissioners Virginia Martin and Jason Nastke, Supervisors on the Columbia County Government Committee agreed that the county should support litigation to have ERMA declared unconstitutional.

As reported by Francesca Olsen of the Register-Star:

Democratic Commissioner of Elections Virginia Martin and Republican Commissioner Jason Nastke presented documentation on the State’s required impending switch to optical scanners and ballot marking devices at the January County Government Committee meeting Jan. 26.

Martin said that several counties, including Nassau County in Long Island, are interested in joining proposed litigation to declare the state Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) unconstitutional. Supervisors on the committee were in general agreement that Columbia County’s involvement in the litigation was the right move.

All counties in New York are expected to use optical scanners for the 2010 primary and general elections. Nastke told the committee that just to print the paper ballots from BMDs — ballot marking devices — and optical scanners, it would cost the county $100,000 per year. “The county could put that towards a bridge!” he said. “There’s nothing for us to lose by joining in this lawsuit.”

“Election administration gets a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more opportunities for errors,” Martin told the committee about the switch from lever machines to BMDs and optical scanners. For example, the paper ballots the new machines use (and the machines themselves) can take up a lot of space, and must be stored securely year-round with “fort-knox style security, bipartisan locks, environmental controls,” according to materials handed out by Martin at the committee meeting.

It was suggested that if the lawsuit just delays the implementation of ERMA, it would save taxpayers the cost of new machine implementation for a little longer. “I’m not too thrilled with these scanning systems,” Nastke said, “but I’m required by law to implement them.”

Optical scanners were certified by the State Board of Elections in December, and ERMA would require the discontinuing of lever machines. “There’s a difference with what the federal government asked, and what the state wants us to do,” said Supervisor Leo Pulcher, R-Stockport.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 does not require states to replace their lever voting machines.

Levers Can Be Used in March Village Elections

2010-01-28T13:41:00.005-05:00

[Additional material was added to this post on 1 February]

The NY State Board of Elections (SBoE)has decided that villages may continue to use the lever voting machines in the March 2010 elections. According to a report in the Post Star "state Board of Elections spokesman John Conklin said officials concluded that counties that haven't participated in a pilot program for the new machines can have an extended grace period."

What is unclear is whether villages in counties that participated in a limited way in the November pilot, like Dutchess, which deployed an op-scan in one voting district in the city of Poughkeepsie, will be required to use the scanners in March.

The SBoE decision was in response to concerns like those in a January 4th memo filed by election officials in Washington County, which did not participate in the pilot, that "The training that we need for ourselves, the inspectors and the technicians is not going to be completed in time for your use." But the other anxiety expressed by the Washington county election commissioners is one which has been systematically ignored by the SBoE despite having been raised consistently by county officials across the state. The Washington Commissioners wrote, "Also a concern is the cost of programming the new machines, transporting them and the printing of the ballots that may be prohibitive to small villages."

Update:

Although electronic voting machines were used in the November 2009 elections, the village of Saranac Lake has asked permission to use lever machines in the March village elections. Village clerk Kareen Tyler said, "I just don't think the expense or availability of the (new) machines is something the village is going to be able to handle." If permission to use the levers is not granted Tyler said the village will go to paper ballots which will be counted by hand. "It would not be difficult to do at all," she said. "There would be rules and guidelines and safeguards so they couldn't be stuffed or anything like that."

The story is reported in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

Ballot Scanners Switched Votes/New York SBoE Certifies Ballot Scanners

2009-12-16T14:39:00.004-05:00

Representatives of ETC attended the State Board of Elections Meeting yesterday where optical scan voting machines made by Dominion (Sequoia) and ES&S were certified for use in New York elections to replace the lever voting machines. We will post further about this meeting late in the day. In the meanwhile please read this important post from Howard Stanislevic at the E-Voter Education Project concerning the implications of vote-switching incidents in the New York state op-scan pilot programs during the November elections.

Officials Were Warned

2009-12-11T11:40:00.005-05:00

Brad Friedman of bradblog.com runs down the run-up to and aftermath of the New York State Op-Scan pilot program and the November '09 elections. Reprinted from The Gouverneur Times.

Officials Were Warned

Northern NY News

Written by Brad Friedman

Friday, 11 December 2009 07:09

Following the recent November election, the Operation Director for New York's State Board of Elections, Anna E. Svizerro declared the experiment of testing new, uncertified voting systems on live voters in a real election to be "very successful." The Watertown Daily Times reported Svizerro's comments, nearly verbatim and wholly uncritically, on Nov. 13th, despite serious concerns that had already emerged about the equipment used in the NY-23 Special Election for the U.S. House, and the errors discovered in its reported results.

Many of those problems, machine failure, inaccurate results, and the difficulty or impossibility of verifying them as accurate following the election, have been reported on in aggressive detail by The Gouverneur Times over the last several weeks.

But concerns about the dangers and pitfalls of New York's pilot program were voiced long before the questionable election of November 3rd. State officials were warned about those dangers via a virtual blizzard of letters sent to them over the past year by state and national election integrity organizations and advocates recommending modifications to the pilot program to ensure voters would not be disenfranchised. Indeed, many of the very same groups who have supported the state's move from mechanical lever systems to computerized secret vote counting were nonetheless extremely critical of the way in which voters were to be used "as guinea pigs" to test uncertified hardware and software in both the primary and general elections this year as part of the pilot program.

The concerns of the election advocates now seem to have been quite prescient, even as they appear to have been largely ignored by state and federal officials.

As early as April 2009, the League of Women Voters of New York State (LWVNYS) - who describe themselves as "a multi-issue, nonpartisan political organization which... has been a supporter of... the replacement of lever voting machines in New York" - had sent a letter [PDF] to both federal attorneys and state election officials urging them to reconsider their proposed pilot program to test machines in this year's elections.

The letter from LWVNYS President Martha Kennedy to Brian F. Heffernan in the U.S. Attorney's office, and CC'd to six different New York State Board of Elections officials, found "merit" in a pilot deployment of the state's new Sequoia/Dominion optical-scan voting systems, but disagreed with the way they were to be prematurely forced upon voters during real elections.

"We cannot support pilot projects using uncertified machines throughout the state," Kennedy wrote, "unless it were coupled with a mandated 100% hand count of the paper ballots which would become the official count." No such mandate was instituted and, instead, uncertified results tainted by the failing and flawed secret vote counting computers were used to install Democratic Party candidate Bill Owens to the U.S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter.

Kennedy also expressed her concern about the "disenfranchisement of many voters because proper and complete testing of equipment and adequate training of election workers would not be possible within an abbreviated time frame."

Two months later, in June, the LWVNYS was joined by the election integrity group New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV) and the public advocacy organization New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) to issue a press release [PDF] about the groups' joint concerns about the pilot project. The release highlighted a report [PDF] from NYVV's Bo Lipari who represented the League on the state's Citizen Election Modernization Advisory Committee.

Lipari, as quoted from his report in the press release, warned the pilot program, as then planned, "gives insufficient regard to the scale of the project, the need for independent verification of results, the potential for problems arising, or a plan for how to learn from and apply the result.

In the press release, Aimee Allaud, Election Specialist with the League also slammed the state's proposed pilot for "using real voters as guinea pigs in the upcoming elections."

"Elections should be transparent, secure and inspire public confidence," NYPIRG's Neal Rosenstein also chided in the release. "Unfortunately, the Board's plan to have over 900,000 voters use new uncertified voting systems this year without requiring meaningful audits of results undermines the credibility of the election and sets a dangerous precedent for the future."

Days later, the three groups were joined by still more election integrity experts and advocacy groups sharing their concerns with the State Board of Elections.

On June 10, representatives from LWVNYS, NYVV and NYPIRG, along with representatives from the Catskill Center for Independence, Citizens' Union, E-Voter Education Project and the Task Force on Election Integrity sent an "urgent" plea to state officials to amend the pilot program.

In their letter "Re: Urgent steps toward election integrity with the 2009 Pilot Program," [PDF] the groups decried the state's "Failure to modify the current plans for the pilot use of uncertified scanners," and noted - correctly, as it turns out, given the uproar following voting equipment failure on Election Day - that it "could lead to a decrease in the public's confidence in the results.

The six organizations - several of which were in opposition to each other on the point of using computerized optical-scanners at all, some preferring the state's continued use of what they regard as more transparent mechanical lever systems - came together to urge the state "to fill these gaping holes in your plan to deploy uncertified ballot scanners," and asked again that they follow the recommendations of Lipari, a retired software engineer and a longtime advocate for the state's new op-scan voting system.

"We believe these corrections of inadequacies in the planned program are essential and quite realistic," they wrote. They urged, among other recommendations, that the state ask counties to "limit deployment of the new machines to 10% of registered voters, even if they earlier agreed to do a full county wide implementation."

That recommendation would not be heeded, and their letter would go unanswered by officials.

In July, after failing to receive a response from either federal or state officials over the previous month, LWVNYS and NYVV tried again, following up their June 3 letter with an "Open Letter to the New York State Board of Elections" [PDF] about the "serious weaknesses of your published 'Pilot Plan' for the deployment of uncertified scanners in the primary and general elections of 2009."

In the wake of a resolution adopted by the Board during their June meeting, the organizations excoriated what seemed to be a "direct repudiation" of their earlier request that the state allow counties to reduce their participation in the pilot program to just 10% of registered voters, as Lipari and the others had called for during the previous month.

"You thus ignored the fact that experts recommend a 10% limit on the size of deployments of new technical equipment, even when nothing as important as votes are involved," they wrote.

While they lauded the Board for taking steps to lay out procedures for the post-election "audits" of results, as they had also recommended, they were highly critical at the Board's failure to revise those protocols "in the direction recommended by experts so that New York would have statistically meaningful risk-limiting audits."

The following week Common Cause of New York, Yad HaChazakah - The Jewish Disability Empowerment Center, Inc. and national election integrity watchdog VotersUnite.org would join with several of the other groups to send yet another joint letter to federal officials at the U.S. Attorneys office as well as to state elections officials, trying yet again, ultimately in vain, to see changes made to the ill-fated pilot program - ("ill-fated", at least as many voters undoubtedly saw it, if not officials such as Svizerro who would, implausibly, declare it a success) - even as the primary and general election drew near.

In their four page letter [PDF] on July 15, detailing ten recommendations "to correct inadequacies in the planned pilot program and to ensure compliance with New York's Election Laws as well as the [federal] Help America Vote Act," they echoed unanswered concerns originally expressed by the NY State League of Women Voters three months earlier, back in April.

"The New York State Board of Elections is now planning a pilot of uncertified optical scan voting systems to be used by up to 1.4 million voters in 46 counties in the upcoming 2009 Primary and General elections," they wrote. "These new systems have not yet been used in real elections anywhere in the country, and still have not completed either New York State or Federal EAC [Election Assistance Commission] certification tests."

"Therefore, voters who use these systems cannot be assured that their votes will be counted as cast. We believe the failure to make meaningful changes to the pilot will raise serious questions about the results of these elections," they said, before detailing their recommendations "incorporating the work of Bo Lipari" and averring that "implementation of the... proposals will greatly reduce the possibility of voter disenfranchisement raised by the planned pilot program and by the use of scanners in future elections."

Virtually all of those repeated warnings, from all of those often disparate groups, sent across several months, seem to have fallen on deaf ears, before voters were both disenfranchised and have likely come to lose confidence in results in the wake of the various failures in the pilot program voting system, many of which have been reported by this news outlet, and others, in the wake of the election.

So why didn't election officials heed the dire, repeated and often "urgent" warnings of both local and national election experts? At this point, we don't know. Calls and emails seeking comment from the New York State Board of Elections co-chairs Douglas Kellner and James Walsh, as well as to Jeffrey Dvorin in the office of the Asst. Attorney General in Albany, NY have so far gone unreturned.

Additional research by The Gouverneur Times' Nathan Barker and Howard Stanislevic of the E-Voter Education Project.

Brad Friedman is an investigative reporter, blogger, election integrity advocate and expert, and the creator and publisher of The BRAD BLOG. He is a broadcaster and contributor to the UK's Guardian, Huffington Post, Computer World and other periodicals, a Fellow at the Commonwealth Institute, and a frequent guest on radio and television outlets from Air America to Fox News. In addition to offering expert testimony on these matters to a number of federal and state electoral oversight commissions, he recently contributed a chapter on the disaster for voters that was the 2008 Election for the book Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-2009 and co-wrote an investigate report on the illegally certified Sequoia touch-screen voting machines, still in use in Nevada, for Mark Crispin Miller's book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 - 2008. This year his work on the mysterious death of Republican IT guru Mike Connell was cited with an award for "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" by Sonoma State University's 33-year old "Project Censored" organization

State Moving Toward Certification of Concealed Vote-Counting Systems Even As Reports of Failures in November's Election Mount

2009-11-30T17:51:00.007-05:00

The State Board of Elections is scheduled to certify several optical-scan electronic voting systems at their meeting in Albany on December 15. Yet as that day approaches, serious problems with the use of these systems in the November 3 election are emerging.

Most glaring so far are irregularities in the NY-23 special congressional election. NY-23 happens to be the home of Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., nationally renowned election fraud investigator. His rapid investigation into the November 3 election reveals election results Phillips says are "impossible," including more votes than voters, negative totals, and the like. His early findings are published in two online articles, "Impossible Numbers in NY-23," and "First the Impossible, Now the Improbable in NY-23."

"Given the mess in CD-23, certification of the scanners at this point would be a travesty," testified Ulster Park's Susan Holland at the Monday hearing before the State Senate Standing Committee on Elections in Albany.

At least one election official, Dem-EC Virginia Martin of Columbia County, has testified that she would refuse to certify an election where she could not verify the count. With optical scan voting systems, vote counting takes place inside a computer where it cannot be seen by observers, candidates, or election officials.

"Voters may never again see a lever voting machine in a NY polling place, but that's not the biggest thing that would be missing from our elections," according to Andrea Novick, attorney and founder of the Election Transparency Coalition. "If the levers disappear, so do our voting rights, because we'll never again know if the votes have been counted accurately." ETC is preparing to file a lawsuit against the state of NY to have the new optical scan voting machines declared unconstitutional because they conceal vote counting from public view. Over 200 years of case law protecting the public's right to transparency in its vote-counting processes would be obliterated by the new voting system. "Even when optical scanners appear to be performing smoothly, there is absolutely no way to know that their secret software has not been corrupted."

The Association of Towns and 20 counties appealed to the State Legislature to repeal the Election Reform and Modernization Act, the law mandating the changeover from NY's current transparent voting system to the optical scan system, yet the State appears determined to certify the new machines apparently regardless of whether or not they are trustworthy.

Oppose Certification of Optical Scanners! Attend State BoE meeting 12/15 in Albany!

Let's fill the room and show the State Board of Elections that the public cares about our elections and insists on constitutional, transparent election systems.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Noon
State Board of Election Offices
40 Steuben Street, 4th Floor
Albany, New York
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/

The Plunging Pilot Project: Impossible Vote Totals in NY-23

2009-11-27T10:00:00.005-05:00

Re-posted from our "Levers" site

Last night, on the eve of Thanksgiving, election fraud investigator Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. published an article in the Governeur Times revealing Impossible Numbers Certified in NY-23. Phillips is best known for his book, Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American Election, detailing the investigation he led of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. But he actually lives in St. Lawrence County, NY. So when questions began being raised about the vote counts in the special Congressional election earlier this month, Phillips was quickly on the case.

His article released last night reveals, “The election results certified by the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections for New York’s 23rd Congressional District contain some numbers that are mathematically impossible.” The article goes on to detail the negative numbers included in certified vote totals. Read it. It reveals important information everyone concerned about democracy should know.

St. Lawrence County was part of the State’s “pilot project,” an early rollout of the optical scan voting technology that will be required to replace lever voting systems by our next election — if not stopped by legal action. The Election Transparency Coalition is preparing to file litigation to have concealed vote counting — such as the counting that takes place inside optical scan voting systems — declared unconstitutional.

St. Lawrence County’s now-certified election results cannot be accurate. The true vote count cannot be known. And while other counties involved in the early rollout of electronic vote-counting systems may have produced possible vote totals, their true vote counts are no more knowable. Only with a system where the public has access to meaningful observation of every step of the vote-counting process do we have a basis for confidence in election results.

This is why Virginia Martin, Democratic Election Commissioner from Columbia County, recently testified that she would refuse to certify an election in which she could not verify the accuracy of the vote count.

Richard Hayes Phillips joins ETC in supporting NY’s time-tested and transparent lever voting system. The reasons for his support are detailed in his article, “In Defense of Lever Voting Machines,” published on his own website, and reiterated in the Gouverneur Times piece.

While the pilot project is clearly in a nosedive, the State is proceeding with its plan to certify the very electronic voting system responsible for the impossible numbers in the NY-23 race. This certification would be meaningless and would lead to elections that are just as meaningless. As Phillips says, “How can we have a democracy if we cannot know if the vote count is accurate? If election officials cannot know, and if the candidates cannot know, and if the voters cannot know that the official results are true and correct, why even have an election?”

Please join us in our work to stop the abandonment of NY’s working, affordable, trustworthy voting system and its replacement with systems that keep the true vote count secret from the voters themselves.

by Emily Levy

Emily Levy is the Election Transparency Coalition project coordinator.

—–

On this Thanksgiving, we at ETC are thankful for the work of Dr. Phillips, Commissioner Martin and all those who dedicate themselves to the constitutional principles of transparent democracy.

Problems Seen with New Voting Machines Are Tip of The Iceberg

2009-11-05T16:00:00.003-05:00

Electronic Voting Machines Sell Tammany Hall Repackaged as “Modern”

Breakdowns of new electronic voting machines have already made news in St. Lawrence, Fulton and Lewis Counties. Official results in some races may not be known for a week or more, frustrating NY voters accustomed to results on election night. But fury may have been their response had they fully understood that with the state's new optical scan technology, the genuine results of NY's elections will never be known.

The optical scan machines mandated to replace all lever voting machines by next year count paper ballots electronically using concealed software that can undetectably alter the outcome, whether intentionally or unintentionally. "What you don't know can hurt you," said Andrea Novick, attorney and founder of the Election Transparency Coalition (ETC). "The problems seen by voters and election workers Tuesday are nothing compared to the problems that are invisible. In the counties participating in the state's early rollout of the optical scanners Tuesday where machines broke down, election officials are at least aware that there was a problem. Where the scanners appeared to run smoothly, election officials, candidates and voters are led to believe everything is fine. But either way, whether the optical scanners appear to be functioning properly or not, the true count is unknowable."

Because the working parts of a lever machine are visible, elections officials and observers can witness all critical steps and know the machine’s count is accurate. But under ERMA (the Election Reform and Modernization Act) the certainty of the election night count is replaced with an unreliable electronic count, subject to verification if a subsequent 3% manual count matches the computer tally. “We are abandoning our transparent, secure system for knowingly exploitable vote-counting computers,” explained Novick.

State Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner confirmed the new computers’ untrustworthiness, stating, "The system in New York is not to rely on the machines, but to rely on the paper," referring to ERMA’s post-election night hand count of some paper ballots. Historically, NY, learned not to trust any step taken outside of public view after repeated Tammany Hall style elections. Now ERMA mandates reliance on paper ballots that have been removed from the public eye. "If we don't stop ERMA," says Novick, "elections will from this day forward become what a New York court has already declared to be 'a useless formality.'" The ETC is preparing to file suit to stop the changeover to electronic vote-counting on constitutional grounds.

# # #

NY: Election Official Would Refuse to Certify Electronic Vote Count

2009-10-25T00:02:00.018-04:00

Columbia County Election Commissioner Testifies at Public Hearing

New York City, Oct. 23, 2009 --

What might have been a quiet hearing of the State Assembly's Standing Committee on Election Law today became instead a public altercation as speaker after speaker criticized the State's move to electronically counted ballots. The change is slated to take effect next year, as outlined in the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), which outlaws the state's time-tested and widely trusted lever voting machines.

Speakers took issue with the new voting systems on multiple grounds including cost, accuracy, and dependability. Concerns about votes counted in secret and the ease of manipulation of election results with the new system abounded.

Columbia County Democratic Election Commissioner Virginia Martin testified that "the mandated transition to electronic voting and vote-counting will likely prevent me as commissioner from doing my job, which is to certify to the accuracy of election numbers."

While she praised some of the State's actions to comply with new election law, she said the new computerized voting systems are poorly made and break down often, in contrast to the dependable lever voting systems currently in use. "If Columbia County starts using software to count votes, I will not certify an election unless an appropriately designed audit of the paper ballots is conducted. So far, the State Board [of Elections] has not mandated an audit that audit experts agree will expose inaccurate counts."

Commissioner Virginia Martin Testifying (Photo by Russell Branca)

Exorbitant costs are also of concern to Martin. "Boards [of Elections] across the state have encountered enormous resistance from their counties when they have tried to get the funds these unfunded mandates would have us incur. I know of two cases in which county budgets have tripled."

The panel was surprised to know that Commissioner Martin has an understanding of how the lever machines work. "I believe it’s critically important that commissioners and poll workers across the state understand how the machines work," Martin said. "In the case of lever machines," she added, "it’s simple."

More photos and testimony are available here.

NYC Never Sleeps! Village Independent Dems Opt Out of Op Scan

2009-09-14T13:16:00.039-04:00

Keep-the-Levers Resolution passes after informed public debate.

The more you know about lever voting machines, the more you want to stay with them. This experience - that an informed public prefers lever voting over the vagaries of electronic vote scanners - was demonstrated once again on July 9th at a debate at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery in Manhattan. The event was sponsored by the Village Independent Democrats, a 53-year-old organization established to provide a constant and rigorous examination of local and national issues in the light of independent, liberal Democratic principles. True to their goals of promoting measures designed to serve all the people and to further the interest and participation of all citizens in the civic affairs of their community, the VID presented "The Threat to Voting in New York and What to Do About It" featuring Douglas Kellner, Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections, New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller, renowned author of "Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform" and attorney Andi Novick, founder of the Election Transparency Coalition.

The pros and cons of computerized vote counting, paper ballots, and lever machines were discussed in a well-structured format that, while strictly controlled by the moderator, eventually allowed everyone to participate. For perhaps the first time in a public forum, the hard questions about computerized vote counting were asked -- and at least partially answered.

Among the public participants during the energetic question and answer period, were Columbia County Democratic Election Commissioner Virginia Martin; Teresa Hommel, Chair of the Community Church of New York's Task Force on Election Integrity; and E-Voter Education Project Founder Howard Stanislevic. The experiences of these professionals added an even broader perspective to the information presented by the invited speakers and elicited by audience questions.

Highlights of the evening have been distilled into the following 15-minute video. With additional commentary explaining the precedents established by the rulings of New York's highest court, this video demonstrates concisely how New York's new election law will violate the inalienable right to self-government. We urge all New Yorkers and voters everywhere to watch it:

IT'S TIME TO TAKE A STAND FOR OUR DEMOCRACY from Andrea Novick on Vimeo.

Professor Miller discussed the culpability of vendors in the punch card debacle that brought us the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida, paving the way for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the resulting rush to more electronic vote counting. Miller also spoke of the relative lack of media coverage regarding such events, and the questionable results of more recent optical scan elections. He said that such negligence leaves the majority of the public unaware of the extreme hazards of e-vote counting both here and abroad.

Commissioner Kellner agreed with, and in fact was the first to promulgate, the position of Andi Novick and the ETC that lever voting machines are allowed under HAVA and that it is ERMA -- the New York State legislation -- which mandates the replacement of the lever machines with electronics. But the Commissioner then confused the issue by declaring that New York is under federal court order to replace the levers, as if the federal court had determined HAVA required the levers' replacement. But it is New York that entered into a voluntary agreement with the Department of Justice and federal court judge to replace the levers, as mandated in ERMA. The court 'so ordered' that agreement of the parties. The court never made a ruling that the levers had to be replaced. No one asked for such a ruling. The State was agreeing to comply with its own state law. As Andi Novick explained, the state law is unconstitutional, and an agreement based on unconstitutional law is void and unenforceable.

Although Commissioner Kellner stated that elections should never be decided on faith and trust, he was unable to respond when it was made clear by other speakers that New York would not be relying on the paper ballots to determine the outcomes of elections, but would in fact be trusting the computers. Commissioner Kellner is a conscientious administrator and, in all fairness, it should be noted that his equivocation is a reflection of the extreme duress our election officials are under to institute a fatally flawed system.

It was obvious and understandable that the State Board of Elections is ill-prepared to run elections on computerized voting systems. For example, Kellner, who routinely consults with computer experts, seemed unaware of the difference between source code and object code (the latter being the software that actually resides in optical scanners and the Election Management System PC that programs them). He incorrectly claimed that computer scientists, and presumably even election officials, could tell that the code running on the machines was the correct "source code." Notwithstanding his confusing source code with object code, however, the fact remains that no one can verify that correct software is running in a computerized voting system on election day. With such a misunderstanding prevalent, it's no wonder that election officials are willing to trust our votes to computer code and the vendors who write it.

Kellner finally admitted that New York will not be trusting the electronic machines after all, but instead, will be relying on the paper ballots. But this was clearly wishful thinking on his part. While Kellner seemed to imply that recounts could be had more or less at the drop of a hat, he offered no examples other than recounts of relatively few absentee ballots.

Novick insisted that the State's highest court has repeatedly declared post-election-night counting of ballots already counted at the polls to be far too dangerous to be used to determine correct election results. Only absentee, emergency and disputed ballots are counted post-election, she said, leaving the vast majority of paper ballots to be counted only by computers.

Columbia County Election Commissioner Martin asked Kellner about the costs of replacing levers with scanners. Kellner said the Federal government gave New York about $50-million to replace the levers, but he explained that it would cost closer to $200-million to finish the job. This is consistent with independent cost studies that have shown that all the Federal money provided to the State under the Help America Vote Act will be depleted after only one year of lever replacement by scanners.

Howard Stanislevic commented on the State Board of Elections' lack of action to beef up New York's future post-election auditing. The state will only verify 3% of scanner tallies -- barely enough to confirm the winners of landslide elections in gerrymandered districts -- despite many calls for stronger auditing requirements for over a year by good government groups such as NYPIRG, Common Cause/NY and the League of Women Voters.

After the forum on July 9th, the Village Independent Democrats joined over twenty counties, several labor unions, the Association of Towns of the State of New York, individual towns, villages, good government organizations and thousands of New Yorkers in passing resolutions in favor of retaining lever voting machines. When the public is given the facts, they make the right decisions.

Statement of Support from National Election Integrity Experts

2009-09-13T13:45:00.000-04:00

It is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society that every critical component of the electoral process be subjected to contemporaneous public scrutiny in order for the people to retain control over those who are our public servants. We, the undersigned, have been working toward this end, many of us full time and at little or no compensation for many years. Together we have a broad and deep range of knowledge and experience.

We understand that New York's statutory and judicial law has upheld these constitutional requirements, mandating a transparent election process in which authorized observers have the responsibility to witness and verify each step of the canvass before it is completed, resulting in a demonstrably accurate and certain count on election night, arrived at under conditions of uninterrupted public scrutiny.

We consider the New York litigation to be one of the best opportunities the nation has for serious judicial consideration of the constitutional implications of concealed vote counting. We encourage all who are dedicated to the constitutional principles of democracy to offer whatever help they can to achieve this breakthrough ruling.

Bev Harris, WA - investigative reporter, founder and executive director of Black Box Voting, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.

Abbe Waldman DeLozier, TX - co-editor, co-author Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America-11 Experts Expose the Truth.

Nancy Tobi, NH - founder Democracy for New Hampshire, Chair of the Fair Elections Committee (NH), and Legislative Coordinator of Election Defense Alliance.

Dave Berman, CA - co-founder Voter Confidence Committee of Humboldt County, California.

Sally Castleman, MA
- Co-founder and first National Chair, Election Defense Alliance.

Judith B. Alter Ed.D., CA - Emeritus UCLA Professor, Director, ProtectCalifornia Ballots.

Emily Levy, CA - election integrity advocate who has worked on crucial projects in New Mexico, Ohio, California, and NY, as well as projects of national scope.

Jonathan Simon, MA - co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, former political polling research analyst and author numerous papers addressing statistical anomalies and other evidence of computerized election fraud.

Joan Brunwasser, co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) and the Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews. Her own articles also appear at RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.

Mark Crispin Miller, NY - Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy andFooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform.

Dr. Victoria Lovegren, Ohio - Ohio Vigilance, governing board member; Computer Science, Systems Analysis, Data Analysis, Decision Science, Mathematics

Mary Ann Gould, PA - Executive Director of Coalition for Voting Integrity, host of "Voice of the Voters.

Richard Hayes Phillips, NY- professor, researcher, Author of Witness to a Crime: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election.

Bruce O'Dell, MN - E-commerce security consultant; co-founded US Count Votes and founding member of Election Defense Alliance.

Election Commissioners Party With Vendors

2009-07-11T09:55:00.004-04:00

More than 18 New York counties have passed resolutions asking to keep their lever voting machines and the governor has issued directives to limit state employee travel expenses; nevertheless 180 county election commissioners and staff spent their evenings partying at events sponsored by voting machine vendors who plied their wares at the four day annual Election Commissioners Association meeting at the Finger Lakes in late June.

Here are some highlights of the Daily News report of the event which is worth reading in full, especially for the photos:

At this conference, vendors seeking business with election boards across the state picked up the tab for food and open bars...

On Wednesday, commissioners and staffers attended work sessions about paper ballets, vendor contracts and other election issues. At one point, Sequoia and ES&S - two companies vying to supply electronic voting machines to election boards across New York - pitched their wares...

As the party ended, some revelers re-created a scene from "Animal House" by jumping up and down, yelling "Shout!" to the Isley Brothers' hit.

[New York Election Commissioners Association president William]Scriber said he didn't know which vendor paid for the private party room and liquor and had "no recollection" of who threw the costume party. A hotel sales rep did not return calls.

Lever Voting Advocates Go Head-To-Head with State Board of Elections Commissioner in Public Forum on Thursday

2009-07-07T20:55:00.014-04:00

As State Pushes Ahead with Rollout of Computerized Voting Systems, Election Watchdogs Threaten Legal Action

What: Public Forum: The Threat to Voting in New York and What to Do About It

When: Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Main Sanctuary at St. Marks Church in the Bowery, 10th Street and 2nd Ave in Manhattan

Who: Douglas Kellner, Commissioner of NYS Board of Elections
Mark Crispin Miller, renowned author of "Fooled Again, The Real Case for Electoral Reform"
Andi Novick, attorney and driving force behind efforts to preserve New York's constitutionally-compliant lever voting system, founder of the Election Transparency Coalition

Sponsored by the Village Independent Democrats

Why: New York State is the only state in the U.S. that conducts elections in a transparent and verifiable manner. All other states have moved to electronic vote-counting systems that make it impossible for election officials, official observers, candidates, or the public to determine whether the announced vote totals accurately represent the votes cast. These concealed vote-counting systems violate the principles of a constitutional democracy as represented in two centuries of statutory law and judicial precedence interpreting New York’s Constitution, and as recently held by Germany’s Constitutional Court.

Yet electronic voting systems are slated to be fully operational in New York by 2010. And 1.4 million of New York's registered voters will be forced to vote on them this year, without even the weak assurance of State or Federal "certification" or a 100% election-night hand count to confirm that the systems' count was accurate.

At this free public event, Andi Novick will outline the reasons New York's Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) is unconstitutional, Mark Crispin Miller will discuss the dangers of electronic vote counting systems, and Douglas Kellner will explain the state's insistence on an expensive change in election technology beyond what is required by the federal government.

Links: Andi Novick/Election Transparency Coalition: http://nylevers.wordpress.com/
Mark Crispin Miller: http://markcrispinmiller.com/
Douglas Kellner: http://www.elections.state.ny.us/
Village Independent Democrats: http://villagedemocrats.org/

# # #

Voting Rights Groups Respond to Holt Bill

2009-07-01T17:21:00.002-04:00

Reposted from our friend Mark Crispin Miller , the response of some voting rights groups to the recent New York Times endorsement of the Holt Bill.

From Bev Harris:

CHERRY-PICKING ELECTION REFORM ADVOCATES, STACKING THE EXPERTS DECK

(You may discuss this at http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80460.html)

As far as I can tell, the editorial–which did not even provide the correct name for the bill
–did not contact or seek any input from the many voting rights and election reform groups
that oppose this legislation. Among those omitted were Black Box Voting, VotersUnite.org,
Open Voting Consortium, and Democracy for New Hampshire, whose Nancy Tobi has been examining Holt’s various renditions of his bill for years; nor did the Times note the opposition
of Brad Friedman of Bradblog, interview voting rights scholar and attorney Paul Lehto, or
confer with the Election Defense Alliance.

Columbia County Election Commissioner Rejects "Pilot Project."

2009-07-01T16:29:00.004-04:00

Columbia County Election Commissioner Virginia Martin writes on why her county will continue to use lever voting machines in the fall elections:

Uncertified Machines Do Not Serve Voters

A sentence in the June 17 editorial, "Iranians' fight for democracy," sent a chill down my spine.

"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."

Hold that thought. Something else -- that I literally shudder to connect to the above -- has been nagging at me for some weeks. It is this:

How many candidates running for office this fall know that the votes that will decide their fate will be counted by an uncertified computer program?

And how many of those candidates know that only a small fraction of those votes will be hand counted after the fact to see if that uncertified computer program (which also has not yet proved to be accurate, reliable or tamper-proof) worked as it was intended to and was not hacked into?

"A limited recount."

Across New York, 47 counties with 1.4 million registered voters will participate in a "pilot project" in which uncertified optical-scan voting machines, manufactured and programmed by Sequoia Voting Systems or Election Systems & Software, will count the votes. Some of these counties signed on for full participation, so that all the votes in every election district will be cast and counted using uncertified machines. Other counties signed on for participation of a more modest scope, in which just a few districts, perhaps, will be involved.

And the recounts of these votes?

They'll be limited.

Right now, and the regulations are now being considered, it appears that three percent of all machines will be subjected to a hand recount. Additionally recounted, and fortunately at 100 percent, will be any race in which there is a margin of one percent or less between candidates. (Think about that one. If Candidate A receives 51 percent and Candidate B receives 49 percent, there will be no full recount.) Fortunately, it does seem that each race will be subject to at least a partial recount.

It's been suggested that any candidate will have the option of going to court to request a full recount. Yet that unfairly puts the onus on the candidate, who risks charges of sour grapes or of running up expenses to add to the taxpayers' tab. Remember that this year, an "off year," is the election for modest candidacies -- for town board members, tax collectors, highway superintendents. These are not races in which high-powered attorneys backed by deep-pocketed interests stand ready to spring to action, to demand the recounts their clients deserve.

But Columbia County candidates and voters will be far better served. None of our races will require "limited recounts" because none will be counted by an optical scanner. Voters will select candidates using their choice of a lever machine or ballot-marking device.

That's because Commissioner Don Kline and I opted out of the optical-scan pilot project. We, along with the overwhelming majority of our custodians, inspectors, voters and county legislators, hope to continue using this voting system of lever machine with ballot-marking device, which meets all the requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act, well into the future.

Virginia Martin is the Democratic commissioner of the Columbia County Board of Elections.

(First published in print in the Albany Times Union June 25th 2009.)

"...Iran's supreme leader ... has called for a limited recount."

Hold that thought. Something else -- that I literally shudder to connect to the above -- has been nagging at me for some weeks. It is this:

How many candidates running for office this fall know that the votes that will decide their fate will be counted by an uncertified computer program?

"A limited recount."

And the recounts of these votes?

They'll be limited.

Virginia Martin is the Democratic commissioner of the Columbia County Board of Elections.

Like Filling Out Lottery Tickets: New York State Rolls Out Uncertified Voting Systems for Fall Preview

2009-05-31T14:55:00.010-04:00

Despite the steady stream of keep our levers resolutions emanating from county legislatures throughout the state, the State Board of Elections is carrying through with a pilot Op-scan project for the fall 2009 elections. ETC e-voting education consultant Howard Stanislevic sounds the alarm in this post from his blog e-voter.blogspot.com :

ALBANY -- At a May 12th Commissioners' meeting, after collaborating with the US Dept. of Justice, the New York State Board of Elections cavalierly decided to risk the disenfranchisement of nearly a million of the state's voters, by allowing what one commissioner called a "huge pilot" of uncertified software-driven electronic vote-counting systems around the state in 45 of its 62 counties.

Here are the links to the Commissioners' resolution, and other documents containing the details of the plan:

* Authorizing Resolution 05/12/2009 (PDF 50KB)
* Pilot Plan Narrative 05/12/2009 (PDF 65KB)
* Timeline 05/12/2009 (PDF 492KB)
* County Participation Spreadsheet 05/12/2009 (PDF 42KB)

Over 900,000 voters (read: guinea pigs) could be affected by these irresponsible tests, which one county election commissioner, perhaps unwittingly, compared to filling out lottery tickets. Gambling with the votes of a million New Yorkers is hardly a way to instill public confidence.

The plan contains almost no provisions for manual recounts of the paper ballots to check the computer tallies, other than those that might be obtained through the courts. The only exceptions are for contests with a margin of victory of 1% or less. Full recounts of those contests will be conducted, but we bristle at the suggestion that the victory margin reported by the uncertified voting system will be the one used to determine whether or not the hand count to check the system will take place.

Commissioner Douglas Kellner made a motion at the May 12th meeting to allow any candidate to ask for and obtain a full hand recount. His fellow commissioners defeated it by a bipartisan 3 to 1 vote.

Apparently Kellner's colleagues believe that:

* any candidate can convince a judge that a voting machine didn't count her votes -- even without evidence to support such a claim;

* the judge will also believe that the paper ballots have been preserved inviolate and thereby allow them to be hand counted to find out who really won an election (contrary to a number of previous decisions by the highest court in the State -- not to mention the highest court in the land); and

* the court would gladly spend taxpayers' money for such high-minded purposes as convincing losers of elections, and their supporters, that they really lost fair and square -- even given the amount of money already spent on the new voting systems.

But the voters of New York deserve more than just naive speculation about the ease of obtaining hand counts from a potentially partisan and cost-conscious judiciary. They deserve the actual hand counts if and when they are needed.

So what if the margin of victory happens to be slightly more than 1% (say 1% + 1 vote for example), and the courts deny the recount request? In that case the hand count reverts to only a 3% spot check, per Election Law § 9-211 -- part of the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 that brought us this mess in the first place. If there are no discrepancies found in the spot check, the election could be certified -- which is more than can be said for the voting systems that actually produced the election results.

Unfortunately, the math is unequivocal: in many elections, a 3% audit can reveal absolutely NO discrepancies, and the outcome of the elections can still be absolutely wrong. If that happens, no one will be the wiser.

One other potential safeguard remains for the million voters who will be subjected to this foolish experiment: the long-awaited and yet to be promulgated State Board of Elections auditing regulations known as Part 6210.18. For well over a year now, we have been involved in the drafting of these regulations. They offer the only hope for anything better than the ill-considered 3% spot checks in the Election Law.

A year ago, many of New York's good government groups wrote to the Board, asking for these regulations to reflect best practices. But so far, progress has been slow to non-existent in this area, even as the mad rush to run real elections using potentially fake voting systems continues.

All that said, while the value of certification has been greatly exaggerated, we think it might be fair to say that if done properly, certification can prove that a voting system can work -- not that it actually will work. This weak assurance is of course not sufficient, but it's better than no assurance at all. The only way to be sure to prevent the disenfranchisement of New York's voters by untrustworthy computers, is to hand count 100%, at least until the systems are certified.

We'll be following this story and reporting on efforts to fix this latest debacle and avoid the Floridization of New York's elections. We don't think this is what New Yorkers signed up for when the State accepted $50-million in federal funds to replace its lever voting machines under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The State has not been able to certify a voting system to replace the levers since then, and as always, it's important to read the law first.

In New York, the law has been decidedly anti-recount. So paper ballots or no paper ballots, the software counts will rule -- just as they did in Florida's 2000 election which brought us Bush v. Gore and ultimately, HAVA itself. Ironic, huh?

The Board did agree to present the matter to the State's Citizens' Election Modernization Advisory Committee. While their opinions are as yet unknown, and probably not binding, at least one member of the group has gone on record as favoring 100% hand counts of ALL votes counted by ANY uncertified voting system. This is in direct conflict with 3 out of the 4 State Board of Elections Commissioners who represent our two major political parties, but unfortunately may no longer be faithfully representing the voters of New York.

Editor's note: Election Transparency Coalition does not endorse op-scan counting with less than a 100% hand-count verification conducted at the polling place on election night.

Ramifications of E-Voting: Spiralling Needs & Costs

2009-05-15T20:41:00.008-04:00

Lest there be any doubt that op-scans will generate ever-increasing obligations, needs and costs for our election boards, check out this advertisement sent to our county election commissioners from NTS Data Services (emphasis supplied):

Subject: Machine Inventory and Management from NTS

Hi Everyone,

Many interesting bits of information came out of the State Conference sessions last month, particularly in the area related to our new voting machines. What has become more and more recognizable throughout this entire process, (and spelled out by the State Board in the Tuesday afternoon session) is the need to accurately and precisely track vital information about each and every component of your voting equipment and related inventory throughout their lifetime.

Understanding this requirement, NTS is developing our asset tracking and machine management system we call "CUSTODIAN". CUSTODIAN will address a number of the requirements you will have to meet in order to be compliant with State regulations including:

· Tracking of Machine Testing Dates
· Maintenance and Error Logs
· Security Seal Numbers
· Chain of Custody Reports

.......and the list goes on

The information CUSTODIAN will provide will be substantial and believe me it's going to have to be. This type of data is not something that can be hand written down on a piece of paper or easily managed via a spreadsheet or simple database. As you heard from the State Board, this is critical information that you are going to have to maintain and should have access to at a moments' notice.

Our current plans call for a release of a simple and straightforward inventory and asset tracking module prior to the September primary - in time for use in the pilot projects this year. The full management version will be released in the first quarter of 2010, allowing you plenty of time to become familiar with it before implementation of the certified machines in the 2010 elections.

CUSTODIAN will be a work in progress, changing and developing to meet the needs of our New York State counties as they will continue evolve. As we go down this new road together, it is obvious there will be many changes and additional requirements driven by your needs and those of the State. We have never let you down before and are not about to this time around.

In the next few days you will receive by mail additional information on CUSTODIAN. This mailing will summarize some of the many features that will be included in the system - take a look at it, I think you will find it interesting and helpful.

We look forward to both your comments and interest.

Take care

Not the kind of growth industry we can look forward to.

Pro-Lever Citizens Testify Before NY Senate Committee

2009-05-15T11:00:00.005-04:00

The New York Senate Standing Committee on Elections is holding a series of hearings across the state to receive public comment on proposed election related legislation. Pro-lever activist from New York City, the Hudson Valley and the Capital area took advantage of a meeting on May 11th in Albany to present their views on retaining our lever voting machines before Senators Joseph Addabbo, Jr., committee chair and Senator Joseph Griffo.

Representatives of New York Citizens for Clean Elections , the Kingston Branch of the American Association of University Women, ARISE, and Election Transparency Coalition joined other citizen activists in speaking out against software based voting systems and in favour of levers. Although the meeting was not specifically convened to address voting system legislation, pro-lever speakers made up half of the speakers presenting public testimony, pointing out the constitutional abuses posed by electronic voting, the unsustainable costs, and urging the Senate to consider rescinding or amending the State Election Reform and Modernizations Act (ERMA) to allow for the continued use of lever voting machines.

Here are links for the testimony of Ruth Wahtera of AAUW Kingston who maintains a blog on lever voting machines and Joanne Lukacher of ETC.

Essex County Rejects State-Mandated Electronic Voting System

2009-05-04T15:14:00.017-04:00

Elizabethtown, NY --

Essex County wants to keep using its dependable lever voting machines, according to today's vote by the Board of Supervisors. Citing the "insurmountable" costs of the optical-scan systems mandated by the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), the Board passed a resolution "supporting the continuation of our lever voting machines together with Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) and rejecting the use of a computerized voting system[.]" The resolution requests that the State Legislature and Board of Elections enact the necessary laws to allow counties to keep their current election systems.

Today's action by Essex County follows similar resolutions passed by Dutchess, Columbia, Ulster, Schuyler, and Greene Counties and the Association of Towns. Other counties are considering similar action.

"I'm really gratified that Essex County showed such leadership and am hoping it will encourage other counties to join, and ultimately to join in litigation with citizens to challenge the constitutionality of ERMA," said Andrea Novick, legal counsel for the Election Transparency Coalition. The Coalition has prepared litigation challenging ERMA on constitutional grounds, as the State Constitution prohibits concealed vote counting. Software-based systems tabulate votes in a way that cannot be observed by election staff, official observers, or anyone else.

New York is the only state in the U.S. that counts all its votes in a manner that is verifiable and avoids the risk of incorrect election results resulting from computer malfunction or manipulation. In response to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) nearly the entire nation adopted software-based voting systems, despite the federal government's failure to provide the funding for this changeover.

New York achieved HAVA compliance by outfitting every polling place in the state with a ballot marking device to assist voters with disabilities. The BMD provides a computer interface that creates a paper ballot; these ballots are counted by hand on election night at the polling place.

It is not HAVA but New York's response to HAVA, the Election Reform and Modernization Act, ERMA, which is the legislative mandate to replace the levers. Unless amended, repealed, or declared unconstitutional, ERMA would require electronic tabulators to be used in all NY counties. Electronic voting systems have proven to be problematic throughout the nation, breaking down, losing votes, and leading the public to question announced election results.

New Yorkers and Local Governments Acting Now To Save Our Lever Voting System

2009-05-02T14:00:00.005-04:00

Essex County will become the 6th county joining the Association of Towns in passing resolutions to retain our lever voting machines. More counties are expected to follow.

● The very close race in NY’s 20th CD proved lever machines succeed where software machines fail: New York’s lever voting machines provide reliable, observable evidence of the count at the election. Software voting machines do not.

● Officials and observers inspect each lever machine to see that machines are programmed to count properly. Software machines are secretly programmed. Lever machines cannot switch, flip or add votes; software machines can. Software machines can produce false election results.

● The Help America Vote Act does not require the replacement of lever machines. New York’s State’s Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) does. ERMA is unconstitutional.

● The Election Transparency Coalition NY has prepared litigation seeking to declare computerized vote counting machines unconstitutional.

● Germany's Constitutional Court banned computerized vote counting machines last month, declaring them unconstitutional.

● In March, a CIA cybersecurity expert reported that computerized elections are vulnerable to rigging. He believes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's election was rigged and that the post-election audit confirmed the false results. The CIA investigated Venezuela’s elections because Smartmatic, a Venezuelan-owned voting vendor, owns the Intellectual Property rights to Sequoia. Sequoia will program the software for most counties in New York if ERMA is not stopped.

● A Pennsylvania legislator introduced legislation last month to allow counties in PA to return to the use of lever voting machines.

● Lever machines are affordable, reliable and with proper maintenance can last another century. Software machines are expensive, unreliable and will have to be replaced in short order due to technological obsolescence or limited useful lives.

If you have something that works and something that doesn't work, I vote for the thing that works. -- State Board of Elections Commissioner Gregory Peterson, regarding lever voting machines.

A PDF version of this post is available here.

Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition is a non partisan, not for profit organization dedicated to transparent elections in New York through the use of non-computerized electoral systems. http://remediaetc.blogspot.com

ETC is a project of International Humanities Center, a 501(c)(3) organization.

Clear evidence: Lever voting works

2009-05-02T00:20:00.007-04:00

The following Op Ed by ETC Founder Andi Novick was published in the Albany Times Union on April 16, 2009:

Clear evidence: Lever voting works

The chair of the New York State Republican Party commenced litigation before the results were counted in the special election in the 20th Congressional District. Some have attacked his move as a Republican ploy. Others have questioned whether the lever voting machines' dead-even results are even possible.

What is missing in this broad-stroke reporting is that New York is not like the other states in the nation that use computerized voting machines, which conceal vote counting. New York's votes are still counted transparently, employing a centuries-old system that was designed to provide evidence of how votes were counted at the time they were cast. This critical distinction sets New York apart from the rest of the nation.

New York's Republican Party is looking to examine and secure that evidence. That is precisely what New York's electoral system is intended to provide. It is what the public is entitled to, and only in New York is this evidence available. Unfortunately for the democratic process, this may be one of the last times New York candidates, parties and citizens will be able to have proof of its election results. If New York replaces its lever voting system with computerized voting machines, the evidence the Republican Party properly seeks to inspect and preserve will be gone forever.

In a democracy, it is the Legislature's responsibility to create a structure in which voting can occur in the most secure manner, one that produces demonstrably certain election results. Just as in a criminal trial, where the state must prove the defendant's guilt to the satisfaction of a jury, in an election the state must establish its innocence to the satisfaction of the public. In both cases, the state must sustain its burden with unimpeachable evidence.

To wit: In a criminal trial, after a crime has been committed, the state must find the evidence and then preserve that evidence for trial.

In an election, before any crime (any vote tampering) could possibly be committed, the state must create a system that produces evidence of electoral safety and security and then preserve that evidence should the election be questioned or a trial challenging the results become necessary.

New York has the only electoral system left in America that satisfies these fundamental constitutional principles of public elections and due process. Our system mandates that evidence of the original results must be publicly created — both to satisfy the public of the accuracy of the results and to provide the most secure means to detect and deter fraud or irregularity before it could occur.

Unlike states where close races were decided by the invisible processes of a computer or by a manual recount of paper ballots, New York has the evidence the Republican Party seeks to secure. Had this election's votes been counted by optical scanners, as New York's new Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) requires in future elections, neither the Republican state chair nor the Democratic state chair nor the public would be able to obtain this evidence of how the ballots were counted at the time they were cast. That's because the evidence will no longer exist. Software-driven voting machines conceal that which is visible and preserved on the lever machine. Neither election officials, nor observers, nor candidates can observe or know how software counts votes in an election. There is no evidence after an election of how the software did its work, as there is with mechanical immutable lever machines, because software is vulnerable to undetectable manipulation.

Elections belong to the public. And the public must be able to evaluate the performance of those charged with the responsibility of conducting the election. The state is rightfully on trial in any election to prove to the candidates, the public and the political parties that it did its job in ascertaining accurate results. We must all be satisfied of the state's innocence (or not) in conducting this election. The Republican Party has the right to put the state to its proofs.

Greene County Lever Resolution

2009-04-19T17:02:00.001-04:00

Greene County Resolution
to Keep Lever Voting Machines

Whereas, Greene County has successfully used highly accurate lever voting machines for many decades with very few problems and wants to continue using them, and

Whereas, Greene County believes that continued use of lever voting machines is in the best interest of the public, that unlike optical scan computers, our time-proved lever machines can be relied upon to accurately count votes as cast and cost far less, and

Whereas, our lever machines now comply with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) because New York has installed ballot marking devices for voting by disabled persons, and

Whereas, New York State's enactment of the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) predates installation of the ballot marking devices for disabled-person voting and New York now complies with HAVA, and

Whereas, the State's statutorily required elimination of lever machines through ERMA is no longer necessary, is inappropriate, and exorbitantly costly to Greene County tax payers, therefore be it

Resolved, that the Greene County Legislature hereby requests the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize continued use of our lever voting machines, and

Be It Further Resolved, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to Governor David Paterson; New York State Senators James Seward, Malcolm Smith, and Dean Skelos; New York State Assembly Members Peter Lopez and Timothy Gordon; Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen; New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Peterson; and Greene County Elections Commissioners Frank DeBenedictus and Thomas Burke.

Greene County Passes Lever Resolution

2009-04-16T13:08:00.004-04:00

Greene County is now the fifth New York County to pass a resolution urging New York State Legislators to save our lever Voting Machines.

Election Transparency Coalition has been working with our coalition partner, New York Citizens for Clean Elections, to forward this resolution in Greene County. Here is their report:

In a surprise move on Wednesday, April 15, Greene County Legislators unanimously passed a resolution urging New York State Legislators to save our lever machines instead of waiting until April 20, the date they had originally scheduled for the vote.

The county legislators are responding to citizens' concerns that a switch to optical-scan computers with a history of hacking and breakdowns common to all computers would not only endanger the safety of our votes, but would also vastly increase Greene County's budget and require huge tax increases.

Op-scan computers cost between $11,000 and $12,000 each, with the total cost varying with each county. According to Mary Jo Jaeger, Deputy Budget Officer for Greene County, the cost for Green County came to $352,500.00 for 30 machines. Of this, she said, the county paid 5%, which came to $17,625.00. The other 95% was paid with federal monies. However, she says, that was only for the initial purchase of the machines. Her office has not yet compiled the figures for future operations of the computers, which will be the county's full responsibility. Over the long term, say citizens who want to save our levers, maintenance, storage, and testing, along with very expensive technical support, training, and paper ballot costs, could easily raise those figures to many millions, while keeping our levers would not significantly add to our tax burden.

Keeping our levers became possible in November 2008, when New York installed ballot-marking devices (BMDs) in every polling place for people with special needs, which made New York's levers fully compliant with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

The drawback at this point, says Irene Miller, founder of New York Citizens for Clean Elections, is the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), "which New York State legislators passed in 2005, mandating computer voting. But ERMA was passed before we got the BMDs that made our levers compliant with HAVA. Rescinding ERMA would pave the way to save many millions of taxpayer dollars and our most fundamental protection of democracy---a trustworthy, secure vote, which is not possible with computers, but is possible with our levers, which have served us very well for many decades."

Miller says some of the problems inherent in optical-scan computers are:

• There is no way to verify that a computer is internally counting voter-verified ballots as cast because computer software is mutable, meaning that the software can be programmed to invisibly "modify itself during an election and then modify itself back to its pre-election state after the election. This can happen even if computers are certified. A National Institute of Standards and Technology study and dozens of other computer-scientist studies clearly show that computers can be programmed to function one way during certification testing and another during an actual election."

• Optical-scan computers would require hand counts because of their ability to mutably change scanned voter-verified ballots. Currently, the state mandates a 3% hand count of op-scan ballots, which ignores a computer's mutable ability to comply with the hand count. If a discrepancy should be identified at 3%, all paper ballots would, presumably, be recounted by hand, which would take a great deal of time, be enormously costly, and add a serious concern about chain of custody, which means continuous observation of all voted ballots by representatives of all parties would be required until the entire count is completed in order to prevent any possibility of vote tampering. Lever machines are not mutable and chain of custody is far less of a problem with them.

For a clear demonstration of how scanned voter-verified ballots can be easily switched inside optical-scan computers without a trace, Miller recommends the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy".

Close Congressional race in NY District 20 Demonstrates Need to Keep Lever Machines

2009-04-09T14:11:00.003-04:00

From the beginning it was suspected that the race to replace Representative Kirsten Gillibrand in New York’s 20th Congressional District would be close, but as the margin between the two candidates tightened, with Democrat Scott Murphy taking a slim lead in the polls going into election day, the Chair of the NYS Republican Party filed a petition in the Supreme Court in Dutchess County to ensure that the normal procedures for ensuring accuracy and transparency of the vote counting process were followed and that the evidence of the count be preserved and available for judicial review if necessary.

The implications of the filing are either an abundance of caution or a wariness of the ‘Heinz 57’ variety of canvassing among the different county boards of election. Whatever the reason, the Republican Party is exercising its rights under New York Election Law to maximize the constitutional guarantees of publicly demonstrable vote counting. What is not being discussed is that if the lever machines are replaced by software-based electronic voting machines all these rights will become meaningless.

New York's Law still requires that votes be counted transparently either by lever machines or by hand. New York Election Law employs a system that was designed to provide evidence of how votes were counted at the time they were cast. According to New York Election Transparency Coalition legal counsel, Andrea Novick, it is this critical distinction which sets New York apart from the rest of the nation.

If New York replaces its mechanical lever voting machines with computerized voting machines, the evidence which the Republican Party is seeking to examine and secure will disappear. Had this election’s votes been counted by optical scanners, as New York’s Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) will require in future elections, neither the Republican State Chair nor the Democratic State Chair nor the public would be able to obtain evidence of how the ballots were counted at the time they were cast. Unlike our lever machines where evidence of malfunction, malfeasance or mis-transcription of the vote count can be detected and corrected as has been occurring this week during the re-canvass of the machines in the 20th district, there is no evidence of how software does its work because software is undetectably corruptible and vulnerable to manipulation.

Software-based scanners conceal what must be visible and leave no evidence of the count to be examined by the parties, the public or the court. All that is left are the indistinguishable paper ballots, which are not evidence of how the ballots were originally counted. A post-election manual count of some ballots, required by ERMA because the software-generated tally is known to be exploitable, is no solution.

As Novick explained, “For 232 years our Laws have presumed that counted ballots, once removed from continuous observation, are so likely to be tampered with that their use has been prohibited. Unless the condition of inviolability is established, the ballots have no evidentiary value. Worse they provide a false sense of security cloaking what is already concealed by the software.”

Unlike the recent close race in Minnesota that was decided by a manual recount of post-election night paper ballots, not shown to have been the same ballots cast at the election, today’s commencement of New York’s absentee paper ballots will be publicly observed from the moment they are cast, through the counting. Novick says, “New York’s Constitution has always required an observable, open electoral process that produces evidence of the count at the time the votes are cast, ensuring maximum protection against fraud.”

“The Republican Party will have the proof it seeks, at least this year.” “But,” she warns, “If we permit the State to abandon our lever voting system for software-based scanners, it will be the last time any one will have evidence of who won the election.”

Schuyler County & Association of Towns pass Lever Resolutions

2009-04-03T18:07:00.004-04:00

In March, the Schuyler County legislature and the Association of Towns of New York each passed resolutions requesting that New York be allowed to keep its lever voting machines.

In enacting its March 9th resolution

URGING THE NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY, SENATE AND GOVERNOR
AND THE NEW YORK STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS TO ENACT LAWS, RULES AND
REGULATIONS THAT SPECIFICALLY AUTHORIZE THE CONTINUED USE OF LEVER STYLE VOTING MACHINES...

Schuyler joined Dutchess, Columbia and Ulster and became the fourth New York County within 3 months to formally express its desire to continue voting on the lever machines.

In February, at their annual meeting in New York City, The Association of Towns of New York also passed a resolution requesting that the United States Congress, the Governor of New York, the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections enact laws, rules and regulations and take all other needed actions to specifically authorize the continued use of lever voting machines. The Association and its members represent eight million New York residents, almost half the population of the State.

New York's Voting System Satisfies & Surpasses HAVA

2009-03-25T16:53:00.003-04:00

Notwithstanding the plain language of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which expressly states that lever machines can be legally used, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) interprets HAVA to effectively exclude the lever machines as ever being acceptable. This interpretation contravenes the statutory language which explicitly refers to the lever system, along with the DRE and optical scan systems, as voting systems that may be used in federal elections as long as they comply with the five standards set forth in HAVA. This memo by Andrea T. Novick, Esq. explains why the the EAC’s advisory of HAVA as it pertains to New York’s lever voting system is erroneous and should be revoked.

ES&S Withdraws Op-Scans from Erie County Test Run

2009-03-24T20:59:00.027-04:00

Election officials in Erie County (Buffalo, NY area) agree that lever voting machines are more accurate and reliable than the electronic voting technologies. However, in anticipation of the state-mandated change to electronic voting machines, the county Board of Elections arranged with Election Systems and Software (ES&S) to test their new DS200 optical scan voting machines through their use in eight village elections in March 2009.

These optical scanners are currently undergoing certification testing by the State Board of Elections, but last year optical scan machines made by ES&S failed pre-election tests in one Michigan county and produced conflicting vote totals in other areas. Election officials reported that the same ballots run through the same machines yielded different results each time.

The Erie County Board of Elections worked for two months with ES&S and election officials in the eight villages on arrangements to use the machines in the March elections. They were prepared to conduct 100% hand counts if necessary to correct scanner errors. But, a week before the election, ES&S abruptly withdrew their offer to make the op-scan machines available. Instead the elections were conducted on the traditional lever machines.

In a press release dated March 11th, Erie County Election Commissioner Ralph Mohr concluded that, "Unfortunately, the fact that the manufacturer pulled out of the pilot project at the last minute indicates to me a lack of confidence in its own system...The lever style machines will afford voters and candidates the confidence in the integrity and accuracy of the voting process during this election."

Mohr told the Election Transparency Coalition that his county had also experienced problems with the vendor's configuration of the AutoMark accessible ballot marking devices (BMDs) in last year's primaries. He said the order in which the contests were presented on the screen, and via the audio headsets used by voters with visual disabilities, differed from that required by the Election Law and correctly printed on the paper ballots. The county ended up correcting these problems on their own for the general election.

The same voting systems have been selected by New York City, Rockland, Albany and Schenectady counties. The AutoMark has the advantage of being a non-tabulating BMD, which at least would not put vote tallies at risk. It's less than half the price of the riskier tabulating BMD that also counts the votes. But the vendor's refusal to run a pilot election with their ballot counting scanners casts doubt on the State Legislature's decision to replace the lever voting machines with computers in the first place.

ES&S is one of two vendors who have submitted Optical Scan machines for state certification review. The other vendor is Sequoia Voting Systems whose ImageCast BMD was deployed by many New York counties in the November 2008 elections. However, as Election Transparency Coalition and the E-Voter Education Project revealed last August, the optical scan portion of the ImageCast contains at least one serious and obvious flaw -- a hole which enables stuffing of the locked ballot box. (See this link for video and a legal analysis.)

- Joanne Lukacher

The Staten Island Recount is Illegal Under NY Law; So is the Replacement of Our Lever Voting System

2009-03-13T16:50:00.017-04:00

--by Andi Novick, Esq.

Given the lack of respect for politicians these days, it may be difficult to appreciate the breadth of legislative wisdom referenced in two centuries of New York’s case law, but the legal requirements for a transparent, theft-deterring electoral system are there for all who bother to read the law.

For 232 years New York’s Election laws have mandated a publicly observable count, concluded on election night. The brilliance of New York’s Get-it-Right-Election-Night voting system has been explicitly driven by the necessity to prevent opportunities for unseen fraud. Justice Louis Brandeis’ observation regarding the benefits of publicity, to wit, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman”, was not lost on successive generations of New York State’s Legislature.

After nearly a century of experience with 19th century electoral fraud, New York’s Legislature perfected our hand count rules by 1896, requiring that there never be an opportunity for unobserved tampering, even by bipartisan election officials (who apparently had been colluding to create fraudulent returns, necessitating one part of the reforms of 1896). Accordingly we have never permitted the post-election recounting of those ballots which were cast and counted at the polling site under maximally safeguarded conditions while public scrutiny is continuous.

Paper ballots in the wrong hands are too vulnerable to manipulation (although not nearly as exploitable as software). Since it is the duty of the legislature to prevent all opportunities for fraud, post-election use of paper has been prohibited for New York’s entire history.

This is still the law in New York: at each poll site, election inspectors must cast and canvass all ballots and “ascertain the total vote [i.e., be certain of the count -- not attempt to verify it after election night] and they shall not adjourn until the canvass be fully completed.” (EL § 9-100)

A properly run paper ballot election must be conducted such that all responsible can be certain of the accuracy of the results. It is designed to enable the detection of error or fraud and any recount or “recanvass must be made immediately in order to correct the error.” (EL § 9-116)

New York also requires a 100% recanvass of precinct tallies, but only to correct transcription errors. (EL § 9-208)

Perhaps it is not surprising that almost no one seems to have noticed that the recount of the recent Staten Island City Council paper ballot election, is prohibited by State law. After all, the 2005 Legislature enacted the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), forcing New York to replace its reliable, transparent lever voting system with a concealed software-based system. In so doing the current Legislature destroyed our constitutional right to a transparent electoral process, substituting it with a concealed software-based system which is so susceptible to undetectable fraud that ERMA requires a 3% hand count of the ballots after the election is over, in an effort to verify the unreliable software-based results. *

Until ERMA was passed, supposedly to comply with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), New York law has prohibited the use of post-election ballots as too dangerous for democracy. It was not even good enough for the ballots to be locked up and guarded by bipartisan election officials, unseen by citizen observers -- unless Court of Appeals’ precedence is to be ignored because the current Legislature has decided that the temptation to manipulate election outcomes has been eradicated from the population. Our experience in New York informs us that once the ongoing surveillance of the polling site itself is interrupted, the opportunities for tampering are just too risky for a self-governing people to endure.

Our two-hundred-thirty-two years of knowledge and our New York Constitution have required that we Get-it-Right-on-Election-night for a reason. In the words of Will Rogers, “More people have been elected between sundown and sunup than ever were elected between sunup and sundown.”

* Note: Click here to see why even if we conduct a partial hand count on election night, 3% is NOT even enough to detect fraud in many cases (PDF)

Highly Recommended: Lever-Voting-Machines Blog

2009-03-02T10:21:00.002-05:00

Ruth Wahtera, writer and voting activist, who has been our correspondent from the American Association of University Women, Kingston branch edits a new blog on lever voting machines which we highly recommend. Thank you Ruth.

Lever Resolutions in Columbia & Ulster Counties

2009-02-22T19:28:00.010-05:00

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.

Only a Transparent Vote-Counting System Can Protect Democracy

2009-02-10T18:43:00.011-05:00

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:

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. ....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Give Me A Lever And A Place to Stand

2009-02-02T13:50:00.024-05:00

"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:

1) Seek resolutions from your county government. At our blog, http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com, you'll find a letter to send to your legislators with contact info and a copy of the text of the first resolution to keep our lever voting system, unanimously passed in Dutchess County, NY, now being considered by other county legislatures and with your help, across the entire state! Send copies of this letter, or your own version, to all members of government. Find helpful contact links at our blog.

2) Sign and circulate this petition: http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/save_ny_levers

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

Please Tell Your County (or NYC) to Keep Our Lever Machines!

2009-01-14T13:07:00.011-05:00

Dear Fellow New Yorkers:

Please help us save our mechanical lever voting machines!

Please send the letter below (in blue) to your County Legislator
(NYC residents, send it to your City Councilmember)

Andi Novick
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition
http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/

GREAT NEWS!

Last month Dutchess County became the first county in New York to UNANIMOUSLY pass a resolution to keep lever voting machines! You can read it here: http://tinyurl.com/dutchessres

NEXT STEP:

Now we need to pass more resolutions from more county legislatures!

Send the letter below (or your own letter) to your County Legislator (in NYC, City Councilmember) to urge him/her to pass a similar resolution to save our lever voting machines! The more legislators we can reach, the better!

WHY?

Our current fiscal crisis will prevent new computerized voting equipment from being handled responsibly. And we shouldn't waste our money on budget-breaking new voting machines when we already have superior, secure, reliable lever voting machines that won't cause the problems and skyrocketing costs other states have had with unreliable, computerized equipment.

Democrats, Republicans and members of other parties have praised our lever voting machines: NY State Election Commissioners Kellner, Aquila and Peterson; Nassau County Election Commissioners Biamonte and DeGrace; Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy; the entire Dutchess County Legislature and the over 1,500 New Yorkers who have signed our petition!

PLEASE ACT NOW!

1. Send the letter below to your county Legislator or NY City Councilmember

Find your county legislator: go to www.google.com and enter your county's name followed by the words "county" and "new york"

Find your NY City Councilmember: click here: http://council.nyc.gov

2. Send a copy of your letter to your county election commissioners

Find your county election commisioners here: www.elections.state.ny.us/CountyBoards.html

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letter to cut, paste, fill in your own info, and send to your legislator and election commissioners:
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Dear County Legislator (or NYC Councilmember),

Last month the Dutchess County Legislature unanimously passed a resolution to retain our lever voting machines (see: http://tinyurl.com/dutchessres). As the resolution says, "it is in the best interest of the public" to continue to use our lever voting machines.

In this time of economic crisis, it is not responsible to move ahead to computerize our elections. In other jurisdictions, computerization has raised the cost of running elections. Now is the wrong time to take actions that will end up requiring us to raise taxes or take monies away from other essential services.

We already have an affordable, secure, reliable voting system that doesn't need to be replaced.

The cost of transition to computerized voting machines will exceed funds received from the federal government. Worse, the money is not for a good purpose, because the new systems lack integrity and violate our constitutional rights.

New York's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) requires replacement of our lever voting machines. The Voters Campaign to Save our Secure Electoral System is commencing litigation next month to have ERMA declared unconstitutional. ERMA precludes election officials from fulfilling their responsibilities to observe and safeguard the elections by surrendering their duties to invisible software processes. More information is at http://www.re-mediaetc.org.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) enabled citizens with special needs to vote independently and New York has satisfied this requirement with accessible paper ballot marking devices in every poll site. While HAVA provided some money to New York for the purpose of replacing our lever machines -- that money is inadequate -- so the additional funds to replace our superior lever voting machines with inferior software-based machines will have to be provided by the counties and New York City.

Finally, we urge you to consider the overwhelming scientific evidence against computerized voting systems (see: http://tinyurl.com/SciStudies). Other states have acted unwisely by computerizing their elections; we should not follow the same path.

Now that our state is HAVA-compliant, there is simply no need for New York to spend millions of additional taxpayer dollars to replace our lever voting machines.

Sincerely,

Your Name
Your Town or Borough
Your Address

Dutchess County Passes Resolution to Retain Lever Voting Machines

2008-12-10T15:55:00.008-05:00

In a surprise move, at a regular monthly meeting otherwise largely devoted to the contentious 2009 budget proposals, the Dutchess County Legislature unanimously passed a resolution requesting that the State Legislature allow the county to retain its lever voting machines. The resolution had been introduced by Legislator David Kelly (R, Pawling, Beekman, East Fishkill) at the December 4th meeting of the Government Affairs and passed by unanimous consent out of committee. A similar resolution had been proposed to the entire legislature last month by Legislators Joel Tyner (D, Rhinbeck, Clinton) and Legislator Jim Doxsey (C, Town of Poughkeepsie) but had not been sent to committee.

In the past month members of the legislatively appointed Voting Integrity Task Force (VITF) of Dutchess County had twice addressed the legislature on the relationship of the anticipated adoption of op-scan voting system to the ballooning Board of Elections budget. The Dutchess County Election Commissioners had also sent a memorandum to the legislature outlining the growth in annual election costs attributable to the switch away from the lever machines to the op-scan technology.

It is customary for a unanimous consent resolution to be voted upon at the next meeting of the full legislature, however on Sunday the VITF was informed that the resolution was being pulled from the December 8th agenda and the vote postponed until the January meeting at which time the VITF was also scheduled to make a formal presentation of their research and recommendations. It therefore came as a surprise to some lawmakers and the public when ninety minutes into the meeting Mr. Kelly asked and was granted leave by unanimous vote to introduce the resolution as an agenda item, citing a bi-partisan desire to inform the state legislature as soon as possible of their request for authorization to keep the lever voting machines and thus keep elections "as straightforward as possible."

Video of the proceedings can be found here. Click on December 8th meeting. The introduction of the resolution starts at the 91.14 minute mark.

Our thanks to Legislators Doxsey, Kelly & Tyner for their role in forwarding this important resolution -- the first such formal expression of support for maintaining the lever machines by a county legislature in New York . Let 's work to spread the word and encourage other county legislatures to follow suit.

Full text of the resolution follows:

WHEREAS, for many decades Dutchess County has successfully used mechanical lever-style voting machines, with very few problems, and is desirous of continuing to do so, and

WHEREAS, New York State enacted the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) and other laws that require all lever machines to be replaced and prohibit the use of any lever machines in any future elections in New York State, and

WHEREAS, Dutchess County believes that the continued used of lever-style voting machines is in the best interest of the public and should be permitted to be used in future elections, and

WHEREAS, the Dutchess County Legislature passed resolution #207026, requesting New York State to allow Dutchess County to continue the use of the lever voting machine, and

WHEREAS, the New York State legislation relating to voting machines far exceeds the federal requirements of HAVA (Help America Vote Act), and

WHEREAS, the State's statutorily required elimination of lever-style voting machines is unnecessary, inappropriate, and costly to Dutchess County taxpayers,
therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature hereby requests the New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Elections to enact laws, rules, and regulations that specifically authorize the continued use of lever-style voting machines, and be it further

RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to Governor David Paterson, New York State Senators Stephen Saland and Vincent Leibell, Members of the Assembly Greg Ball, Thomas Kirwan, Kevin Cahill, Joel Miller, and Marcus Molinaro, Member-elect of the Assembly Frank Skartados, Co-Executive Directors of the New York State Board of Elections Todd Valentine and Stanley Zalen, and New York State Board of Elections Commissioners James Walsh, Douglas Kellner, Evelyn Aquila, and Gregory Peterson.

Dutchess County: Resolution Introduced to Keep NY's Lever Voting Machines

2008-11-09T00:52:00.013-05:00

Will Dutchess lead the way?

Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner (D-Rhinebeck/Clinton) has introduced a resolution to allow Dutchess County and the State of New York to continue to use lever voting machines and not be forced to replace them with insecure and unreliable electronic vote counting systems based on software.

"As Andi Novick, Joanne Lukacher, and many others have accurately pointed out, optical scan voting machines can be hacked into just about as easily as touchscreen voting machines," Tyner said. "The Help America Vote Act does not mandate a switch here in New York State from the lever machines we've long used with few problems. It's just simple common sense -- let's keep the levers."

Kudos to Joel for initiating this action, which we believe is the first of its kind in the State of New York -- and hopefully will be the first of many.

The resolution should be on the agenda for the December 8th regular meeting of the legislature, where the Voting Integrity Task Force they appointed will also be presenting a report. (Check back on these pages for a confirmation of this schedule.)

Members of the public are encouraged to speak at the beginning of the meeting which is at 7:00 PM in the legislative chamber at 22 Market Street, Poughkeepsie.

Here is the full text of the resolution:

WHEREAS, many Dutchess County residents have signed on to join the Election Transparency Coalition and Election Defense Alliance effort to save the last transparent voting system in the United States here in New York comprised of our lever machines, as both New York's lever voting system and its previous hand-count system satisfy the constitutional requirement that voters be able to see how votes are counted; the right to vote is the primary right by which all other rights are protected, and

WHEREAS, in October 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that among other things, created the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC); HAVA required the EAC to produce voluntary federal voting system standards; it took three and a half years for the first set of these standards to be published in the Federal Register in April 2006; New York proceeded to adopt these voluntary guidelines along with its own set of State standards to certify new voting systems to replace our time tested, reliable lever machines with computers, as required by the State's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, but not required by HAVA, and

WHEREAS, section 301 of the Help America Vote Act sets forth five requirements that each voting system has to meet; New York State has met all of them now with ballot marking devices in place for people with disabilities, as noted by New York State Board of Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner four years ago when he stated publicly that, "our lever machines satisfy all but one of [HAVA's] standards: that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is accessible for individuals with disabilities", and

WHEREAS, to date, no voting system tested in New York or any other state has come close to meeting these standards, although the standards themselves are considered too lax by most computer scientists who have studied them; New York's tried and true lever machines continue to function well; almost all of their parts are standard items carried by hardware stores, while the balance of the parts can be produced by machine shops; the outlook for replacing lever machines in 2009 remains doubtful due to continued problems and delays in the certification process; this has been reported on a weekly basis to the US Department of Justice and to the federal judge in their case against the New York State Board of Elections, and

WHEREAS, in November 2006, seven months after the current federal standards were published, computer security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who under HAVA, advised the EAC on the writing of the standards, published a paper on the need for voting systems to be "software independent"; the authors clearly stated that "experience in testing software and systems has shown that testing to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible" (Requiring Software Independence in Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2007, November 2006), and

WHEREAS, New York's constitution has been interpreted by the highest court in the State as recognizing that essential to the express right to vote and the express right not to be disenfranchised are essential implicit constitutional rights, including the right to a transparent process so that voters can know their votes were accurately counted as cast; the right to an open, transparent electoral process, which enables its citizens to be able to evaluate the performance of their government in safeguarding its elections, is further protected by First Amendment rights, also guaranteed by New York's state constitution, and

WHEREAS, software-dependent voting systems can't be made safe, no matter how much New York State's Board of Elections (NYSBOE) continue to test them in order to certify them as "safe"; many computer scientists agree that a compromised machine can be programmed to appear to be working when the fact is that it has been compromised, and

WHEREAS, notwithstanding the impossibility of certifying software-based systems as safe to vote on, New York has been attempting to do this for three years; in 2006, CIBER, the testing laboratory the NYSBOE allocated public funds to in order to certify that computers were safe for use, lost its federal accreditation; recently SysTest, the new testing laboratory the NYSBOE allocated public funds to in order to certify that computers were safe for use, lost its federal accreditation; the NYSBOE has temporarily told SysTest to stop testing, and

WHEREAS, the existing lever voting system protected our constitutional franchise by providing New York Voters with a secure, verified, accurate count on election night, before exposure to post-election influences could corrupt the count; the new legislative scheme deprives us of the completed count delivered under the watchfulness of public scrutiny, instead permitting the election-night count to be the product of knowingly unreliable mutable software, which is then checked by a partial hand-count only after the election is over, after the winner has been announced and after the protection against tampering provided by the ongoing public surveillance of the poll site is over, after which post-election ballots may also be the product of tampering, and

WHEREAS, the problem with only seeing computer-generated results reports or "poll tapes" is that they are merely the recordation of what the software was secretly programmed to do; without public scrutiny of the process of vote counting, poll tapes only create the appearance that the election results are accurate, concealing what citizens have been unconstitutionally barred from observing, and

WHEREAS, in such a process the Dutchess County Board of Elections is prevented from being able to accurately count our votes once forced onto computers, because the process is concealed from them as well as all of us; it is then impossible for the Dutchess County Board of Elections to secure the reliability of that which they have no control over, and

WHEREAS, over three thousand ballots mysteriously disappeared on optical scan voting systems this year in Palm Beach County Florida alone; optical scan voting systems in Washington DC inflated vote totals this year by over 100 percent, making up thousands of write-in votes and adding thousands of votes to the totals of candidates on the ballot, and Pierce County Washington, Pottawattamie County, Iowa, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and Oakland County, Michigan have also had problems with optical scan voting systems, and

WHEREAS, as the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy" proved, it is relatively easy to hack into optical scan voting systems; "Wired" magazine also reported 12/21/05 that computer scientists from the Florida Institute of Technology and Finland "were able to change votes on the Diebold machine without leaving a trace", and "conducted the same test for the California secretary of state's office," and

WHEREAS, software-driven voting systems are "insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election", according to the Ohio Secretary of State's Project EVEREST report last year, and New York State Election Commissioner Gregory Peterson also stated the following at the Oct. 3, 2008 Board meeting in Albany: "What do we do-- go back to lever machines which probably work better than anything else we've ever had; I'm not saying I advocate that; however, if you have something that works and something that doesn't work, I vote for the thing that works," and

WHEREAS, New York State residents should not be forced into a non-transparent, concealed method of vote-counting, with votes counted in a manner so insecure and unreliable that the only way to try to verify the count is by violating New Yorkers' right to a secure, accurate transparent count on election-night, waiting until after the election is over before first manually checking some ballots, surrendering the right to know that votes are accurately and fairly counted as cast, foregoing the right to reliable evidence of the count or of fraud necessary in a court of law, thereby effectively surrendering the right to prove or disprove that the election results reflected the will and consent of voters, and therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the Dutchess County Legislature requests that the U.S. Department of Justice and New York State Board of Elections allow Dutchess County and New York State residents to continue to use dependable, accurate, and transparent lever machines instead of being forced to replace them with electronic voting systems already deemed as unreliable and insecure by a consensus of scientific experts, and be it further

RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to the U.S. Department of Justice, New York State Board of Elections, Dutchess County Board of Elections and the New York State Legislature.

NY State Board of Elections Halts E-Vote "Certification" Tests

2008-11-01T14:15:00.017-04:00

ALBANY, NY, Oct. 31

After informing the US Dept. of Justice, who reportedly have been "speechless" regarding the inability of New York to certify even one electronic vote-counting system to replace our reliable lever voting machines in time for the 2009 elections, the State Board of Elections informed Judge Gary L. Sharpe that they have issued a stop-work order to SysTest Labs, in effect halting the testing effort, until "a further investigation of the issues surrounding the likely suspension [of SysTest by the EAC] could be had."

The news was delivered to the court in the form of the State Board's Oct. 31st HAVA compliance report (PDF), which the court ordered the State to transmit on a weekly basis early this year. The full series of reports can be found here at Election Law @ Moritz. The reports reveal a plethora of problems with the certification process, which had already placed the lever replacement time line known as "Plan A" in jeopardy.

Prior to ordering these reports, Judge Sharpe had stated that he got his information about e-voting from reading the newspapers. We commend His Honor for trying to become better informed on these issues, as they can be rather complex and esoteric at times.

Less esoteric is the need for an accurate and reliable vote-counting system for the State of New York. Fortunately though, we already have one. It's comprised of about 20,000 lever voting machines (all of which are HAVA-compliant now that NY has met HAVA's Accessibility requirements); paper-ballot marking devices for voters with special needs; hand counting of those ballots at the polling place on election night; and the HAVA-required permanent paper records produced on election night -- not by machines -- but by thousands of bi-partisan election inspectors contemporaneously throughout the State.

The one ingredient that is conspicuously absent from New York's vote-counting system, except for a small percentage of absentee ballots (and that is NOT a HAVA requirement) is: SOFTWARE! And we all know how reliable that is -- especially the voting system kind.

The State Board's letter to the court states that they are "hopeful that a plan for resolution of these issues will be developed in the near future." And so are we. It's called Plan L.

NY's Testing Lab's Accreditation Pulled - Again

2008-10-30T17:23:00.005-04:00

For the second time in two years the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) have announced their intention to suspend the accreditation of New York's electronic voting system testing lab, SysTest, Inc. for "failing to comply with program standards."

In a statement released yesterday the New York State Board of Elections announced that SysTest's loss of accreditation would force it to consider the suspension of the software based voting sytems certification testing in New York since the Board requires that all certification testing be performed by an accredited lab.

Although it is likely that this development will delay the certification of the new voting systems past 2009, this is no guarantee that the DOJ will not order the implementation of uncertified voting machines. We must continue to be vigilant.

If you have not done so sign the petition to save out levers and pass it along to your friends.

Write to the State Board of Elections and ask them to stop the "certification" program.

It's now been reported from several sources that when told of the certification problems with these systems, DOJ officials are "speechless."

- Joanne Lukacher

Mission: Possible -- Fight NOW to Retain New York's Lever Voting System!

2008-10-14T21:27:00.023-04:00

Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the ambiguous directives of the Help America Vote Act, and compelled by the state's legislative response, The Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, New York has been harried to replace its reliable lever voting machines with uncertified -- and uncertifiable -- software-driven electronic vote counting systems. This needless yet stubborn campaign to dismantle our secure lever voting system has amounted to a veritable crusade waged by some, in the face of wary election commissioners and despite ever increasing alarm about the vulnerabilities of the electronic systems. In order to inform our members, so they may better express their concerns to their election officials and legislative representatives, Election Transparency Coalition offers the following brief history of events:

Help Save New York's Lever Voting System!

In October 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that among other things, created the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC). HAVA required the EAC to produce voluntary federal voting system standards. It took three and a half years for the first set of these standards to be published in the Federal Register in April 2006. New York proceeded to adopt these voluntary guidelines along with its own set of State standards to certify new voting systems to replace our time tested, reliable lever machines with computers, as required by the State's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) -- but NOT required by HAVA.

To date, no voting system the State of NY (or any other state) has tested has even come close to meeting these standards, although the standards themselves are considered to be far too lax by most computer scientists who have studied them. Our tried and true lever machines continue to function well, and we are about to use them in the 2008 Presidential election. Almost all of their parts are standard items carried by hardware stores, while the balance of the parts can be produced by machine shops. The outlook for replacing the levers in 2009 remains doubtful due to continued problems and delays in the certification process. This has been reported on a weekly basis to the US Dept. of Justice (the DoJ -- who are suing the State Board of Elections) and to the federal judge in their case.

And it's no wonder. In November 2006, just seven months after the current federal standards were published, computer security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who under HAVA, advised the EAC on the writing of the standards, published a paper on the need for voting systems to be "software independent." The authors clearly stated that "experience in testing software and systems has shown that testing to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible." [emphasis added]

But the NY State Board of Elections, its vendors, its testing labs, its not-for-profit watchdog -- the New York State Technology Enterprise Corporation (NYSTEC), and even the DoJ itself, have nevertheless been attempting the impossible. We appreciate their efforts and we feel their pain, but we also believe it's time they faced reality. And they are.

As State Election Commissioner Gregory Peterson said at the Oct. 3, 2008 Board meeting in Albany:

What do we do? Go back to lever machines which probably work better than anything else we've ever had. I'm not saying I advocate that. However, if you have something that works and something that doesn't work, I vote for the thing that works.

Well, we the People of the Empire State, who are perhaps able to speak more freely, are in fact advocating for what works.

While the State will have to return about $50-million in HAVA funds to Uncle Sam, we believe it's a small price to pay for our Constitutional right to vote, to know how our votes will be counted, and to see that our votes will be given full force and effect by way of the lever voting machines. Such things will never be possible with software, which by its very nature is not observable. And this is unconstitutional in our great State.

We are therefore asking the State of New York to:

end this impossible "certification" mission;
return the $50-million Title I HAVA funds to the United States;
continue to deploy ballot marking devices for voters with special needs to comply with HAVA using the remaining $170-million of Title II funds available for this and other purposes; and
allow the voters of New York to continue to vote in free, fair, transparent and secure elections by retaining our lever voting system.

Your State and County Election Commissioners, who have sworn an oath to protect the voters of New York, have the necessary influence to end this madness. The Legislature will heed their advice, just as they did in 2007 when the commissioners asked for ERMA to be amended to remove any date certain for the replacement of lever machines. And the US Dept. of Justice would not have a case for the replacement of lever voting machines if we simply give back a small fraction of our $220-million of HAVA money. This is indeed a small price to pay to preserve our rights and to avoid the kind of electoral chaos we have been seeing in other states and recently, even in the nation's capitol.

Sincerely,

Andi Novick, Esq.
Founder, Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Thomas L. Tedeschi, Esq.
Election Attorney
Queens, NY

Susan Greenhalgh
Communications and Strategy Consultant
Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Teresa Hommel
WheresThePaper.org
http://wheresthepaper.org

Howard Stanislevic
E-Voter Education Project
http://e-voter.blogspot.com

Joanne Lukacher
Executive Director
Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Re-media Election Transparency Coalition on Election Defense Radio

2008-09-24T15:57:00.002-04:00

Andi Novick and Rady Ananda interviewed on September 17th Election Defense Radio on the case for retaining the lever machines in New York. Link at:

ElectionDefenseRadio_2008.09.17.mp3

Fatally Flawed Systems Await Voters

2008-09-24T14:25:00.004-04:00

'Fatally Flawed' Systems Await Voters: 'Drastic Change Needed'

By Rady Ananda

Original version posted at OpEdNews.

A new paper, and video, has been issued by the Computer Security Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This group contributed to voting system reviews conducted by Ohio and California last year. The 11-page paper was presented in July at the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis held in Seattle. Much of it is comprehensible to most voters. The Group also prepared a 17-minute video, presented in two parts that illustrates several attacks, and shows how security seals are ineffective.

The paper clarifies that security is lacking in both Sequoia and ES&S voting systems: "the electronic voting systems that we have reviewed are neither secure nor well-designed." It spends time discussing the certification process which does not and cannot adequately secure a software driven voting system:

"While most critical systems are continuously scrutinized and evaluated for safety and correctness, electronic voting systems are not subject to the same level of scrutiny. A number of recent studies have shown that most (if not all) of the electronic voting systems being used today are fatally flawed and that their quality does not match the importance of the task that they are supposed to carry out." (emphasis added)

This conclusion corroborates many prior statements made by security experts. Twelve such quotes are reproduced here. The UCSB paper states:

"All voting systems recently analyzed by independent security testers have been found to contain fatal security flaws that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the voting process."
...

"Our experience suggests that there is a need for a drastic change in the way in which electronic systems are designed, developed, and tested.
...

"Unless electronic voting systems are held up to standards that are commensurate with the criticality of the tasks they have to perform, the very core of our democracy is in danger."
(emphasis added)

While detailing many of the vulnerabilities in touchscreen (DRE) voting systems, which more than half the states have outlawed1, the paper specifically discusses optical scan systems:

"Evaluations of the various optical scanners offered by both vendors followed much the same pattern of the previous voting system components. A patent disregard for cryptographic authentication and integrity checks allows attackers to overwrite a system's firmware with malicious versions and modify or construct election data to be processed by an EMS.

"Physical security measures were also lacking. In particular, the ES&S scanner lock was easily picked with a paper clip during our tests, while the "unpickable" lock on the Sequoia scanner was bypassed by removing a few screws and pulling out the lock cylinder from the scanner's chassis by hand. In both cases, this allows an attacker to access machine internals to potentially execute arbitrary code."

The Computer Security Group at UCSB issued a statement introducing this information, reposted with permission:

Evaluating the Security of Electronic Voting Systems: Are your votes really counted?

Electronic voting systems have been introduced to improve the voting process. Since their inception, they have been controversial, because both the technologists and the general public realized that they were losing direct control over an important part of the voting process: counting the votes.

A quote attributed to Stalin says: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." It is clear that voting systems represent a critical component of a democracy.

Although the consequences of a malfunctioning electronic voting system are not as readily apparent as those for air traffic control or nuclear power plant control systems, they are just as important, because the well-being of a society depends on them. While most critical systems are continuously scrutinized and evaluated for safety and correctness, electronic voting systems are not subject to the same level of scrutiny.

A number of recent studies have shown that most (if not all) of the electronic voting systems being used today are fatally flawed, and that their quality does not match the importance of the task that they are supposed to carry out.

In the Summer of 2007, the Security Group of UCSB participated in the Top-To-Bottom Review (TTBR) of the electronic voting systems used in California.

The Report

Our team focused on the security analysis of the Sequoia voting system. Our public report can be found here . We found a number of major flaws that can be exploited to compromise the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the voting process. In particular, we developed a virus-like software that can spread across the voting system, modifying the firmware of the voting machines. The modified firmware is able to steal votes even in the presence of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).

The Paper

We wrote a paper that describes our methodology and our findings: Are Your Votes Really Counted? Testing the Security of Real-world Electronic Voting Systems, D. Balzarotti, G. Banks, M. Cova, V. Felmetsger, R. Kemmerer, W. Robertson, F. Valeur, and G. Vigna, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Seattle, WA July 2008.

The Movie

We also prepared a movie that shows how the virus-like attack would be carried out, and exemplifies the different scenarios that our malicious firmware would exploit. The video shows how one can use a simple USB key to infect the laptop used to prepare the cards that initialize the various voting devices. As a result, the cards are loaded with a malicious software component.

When a card is inserted in a voting terminal, the malicious software exploits a vulnerability in the terminal loading procedure and installs a modified firmware, effectively "brainwashing" the terminal. Later, when the terminal is used by the voters to cast their votes, the firmware uses a number of different techniques to modify the contents of the ballots being cast.

The movie also shows that the physical security measures being used to limit access to essential parts of the voting systems are ineffective.

In the end, voters will decide whether to continue voting on systems that over 50 scientific studies, comments and testimony have warned are not securable. That decision will be made by whether they participate in a system that leaves no rational basis for confidence. Or, elections will be decided by computer hackers.

Much thanks to John Gideon of VotersUnite.org for his Daily Voting News feed.

1 Election Data Services President Kimball Brace said touch screens would be used statewide this fall in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Nevada, Utah, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina, and in significant parts of or pockets of a dozen other states, according to an August 15, 2008 McClatchy article.

Sequoia's Sinking Ship

2008-09-23T15:03:00.005-04:00

by Rady Ananda

Cross posted at OpEdNews

"Right now, there is not a single voting system on the market or in use anywhere in the country that meets current federal voting standards, and very few people realize it." ~ Douglas Kellner, New York State Board of Elections Commissioner (AP)

From New York to New Jersey, from D.C. to Florida, Sequoia Voting Systems continue to fail. Vendor response is, we're not at fault and don't you dare study our product. That's because experts tell us in report after report these machines are fatally flawed by design, lacking the most basic security protocols. Yet, election managers continue to use them, and "voter advocacy" groups continue to support their use. A recent University of California (Santa Barbara) paper by the Computer Security Group warned that "the very core of our democracy is in danger."

Designed-to-be-hacked is what we discovered in our own investigation. The physical security of Sequoia's optical scan ballot marking device is designed with a slotted hole that allows up to ten cardstock ballots to be stuffed at once into the locked ballot box. Here's exclusive video.

New York's state level election officials also tend to blame election workers when Sequoia's machines fail. New York tested out its shiny new $12,000 Ballot Marking Device made by Sequoia-Dominion in the September 9th election. When state election commissioners tried to vote on the machines, the BMDs didn't work. At the Sept. 17th NY SBOE meeting, Anna Svizzzero, Director of Election Operations, advised better training of poll workers was needed.

Of 3,350 BMDs deployed in the Sept. 9th election, only 1,333 people voted on them. Only one voter used the BMD in Ulster County – John Decker (D-Highland), who complained that he first watched the 20-minute instructional video and then it took another 20 minutes to vote on the machine. McClatchy reports:

"Decker said he couldn't believe that it took him so long to vote and would like to see the county retain the older lever pull machines."

In Nassau County, 126 BMDs were deployed but only twelve voters used them, reported Nassau County Elections Commissioner, William Biamonte. Making his job even tougher, Sequoia failed to deliver the BMD's privacy materials until the Saturday before the election – after the machines had already been deployed. Twenty technicians had to be dispatched to deliver and install the materials.

Faulty design, hackable software, lengthy voting process and an inability to accurately count the votes won't stop the League of Women Voters of New York State from insisting these machines be used, and promoted for use.

Tempers flared at the end of Friday's NY SBOE meeting when the NY LWV accused election officials in four counties of dissuading voters from using the new software driven optical scan ballot marking devices. Naming Buffalo, Binghamton (Broome), Utica, and Albany, they charged:

"The counties are actively discouraging voters who are not disabled from using the ballot marking devices."

Phew, smart commissioners, even if they are violating state-mandates that all voters can use the BMDs. Maybe they're avoiding hand counts. This year, NY election officials must hand count the ballots cast on BMDs since Sequoia still hasn't been certified for use in NY.

Sequoia admits to hundreds of document discrepancies – that's where they provide one thing but the document says something else; or they provide and document something that New York specifically forbids.

The League also reported that the Albany County LWV co-president "was asked to produce evidence of disability." Because she's not disabled, she lied in order to use the new BMD. Not a smart admission to make in the public record, especially after accusing counties of violating NY election rules.

The NY SBOE was highly skeptical of the League's reports, prompting another LWV rep to became hostile. Commissioner Evelyn Aquilla practically called them liars:

"We'd like to have that in writing, because, you know what? We didn't see that anywhere. Not any place.... To say that every single commissioner did that, across the state, I don't know if that's true or not, because we saw, I saw four different ... counties, and I never saw that anywhere. I went into at least twelve places."

The New York League of Women Voters wholly supports the use of software driven optical scanners, despite scientific condemnation. They must have been ignoring the papers, too, that amplified our breaking story on July 1st when we reported that Sequoia's BMD failure rate in Nassau County stood at 85%. Two weeks later, Wired.com reported a 50% statewide failure rate. Failure rate be damned, the League wants these machines in use. But then, the League of Women Voters also supported paperless touchscreen voting systems until June of 2004.

Sequoia Fails around the Nation

Florida's Palm Beach County, right now, reports that 12,000 votes were not counted by Sequoia's optical scanners in its unending nightmare of conflicting results from the August election. That's where 3,400 votes (or 3500, depending on which news article you read) went missing, then were found, and now 12,000 more ballots have been found that the machines didn't count. This is an ongoing fiasco. Today's manual recount of 12,000 ambiguous votes "turned up an additional 159 uncounted ballots." South Florida's Sun Sentinel reported that "software issues" with Sequoia's optical scanners were to blame.

But the Palm Beach Post reports today that election officials will run another recount through the $5.5 million voting system:

County Commissioner Jess Santamaria questioned the reliability of the machines the county bought from Sequoia Voting Systems.

"I do have serious concerns," said Santamaria, who also serves on the canvassing board. "My concern affects this election and the November election as well. I don't see how we can have confidence in this system."

John Gideon of VotersUnite.org summarizes the situation this way:

“The county now wants to do another machine recount of the recount of the recount and may also ask to do another hand recount of the newly requested machine recount.”

The August vote count troubles follow the June snafu, also in Palm Beach County, when the scanners failed to count 14% of the ballots. At that time, Palm Beach officials were looking to pay Sequoia more money to take over more of the ballot counting process. In January's presidential primary, "defective cartridges" prevented Palm Beach from posting results for several hours. Yet, still, no one in Palm Beach is considering junking the machines, although voters reportedly did dump Elections Director, Arthur Anderson.

Washington, D.C. election officials have had enough, and have subpoenaed Sequoia records to explain why over 12,000 "phantom votes" appeared in the software driven results from this month's primary. When D.C. officials ran the supposedly "faulty cartridges” through the same software, three different results were produced. When they hand counted three precincts, none of the totals matched Sequoia's reported totals.

Better to seize the machines and run a forensic investigation; although, that didn't work out too well when New Jersey tried it earlier this year.

In New Jersey's February 5th primary, Sequoia's AVC Advantage touchscreen voting system produced conflicting vote totals from its own internal memory. When the numbers didn't add up, Union County officials sought the expertise of Princeton University computer security scientists. They caught errors in 60 precincts. Computer scientist Ed Felten produced the tapes showing those errors, and refutes Sequoia's explanations (blaming the pollworkers) for why their computer can't add. Felten concludes:

"Sequoia's own explanation makes clear that they made an engineering error that caused the voting machine to behave incorrectly."

New Jersey officials seized the machines via subpoena, which Sequoia sought to prevent. Sequoia threatened to sue Union if they studied the machines that Union owns. Union County dropped the investigation. Better to have expensive, faulty counting devices than an expensive lawsuit, I guess. Ed Felten explains this case in the second video embedded in this article, starting at about 4:23.

A month later, Sequoia's website was hacked and defaced.

The Computer Security Group at UCSB may be in trouble for posting that How-to-Hack Sequoia video, but only democracy loyalists would warn the public so instructionally. No doubt, the November 2008 election will be determined by computer hackers, or enough citizens will show up to hand count the ballots after the next round of ridiculous totals are reported. Let's not forget the negative 25 million votes reported for John Kerry in one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio in 2004. That had to be a red flag sent up by a loyalist.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia plan to use Sequoia Voting Systems in what is shaping up to be the third questionable presidential "election" in a row.

Note from the editor:

Is the prospect of yet another questionable "election" result at all related to the following report from the Army Times (via democracynow.org.):

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

-jl

The Press, Obama and the Forgotten Legacy of The Civil Rights Movement: Voting Rights

2008-08-30T21:06:00.004-04:00

Author and professor of Media Studies at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller will speak at Vassar College (Main Building, Villard Room) on September 8th at 5:30 sponsored by the college's American Studies Program. Here, in a letter to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, Professor Miller reminds us of the media's (and indeed the candidate's) glaring neglect to report and fight the present day abuses of the core objective of the Civil Rights Movement: the right of all Americans to vote and to have our vote counted.

- Joanne Lukacher

Democracy Without Tears: An open letter to Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert

I wrote this in response to Robinson's "So Many Miles from Selma," and Herbert's "Champagne and Tears," which columns ran in the Washington Post and New York Times, respectively...

MCM

Messrs. Robinson and Herbert,

Your latest columns are quite moving, and I agree with them, but there's a glaring problem with them, too. I noticed the same defect in Seb. Obama's speech on Thursday night: a speech that also moved me very much, although that problem is a big one--maybe fatal.

Specifically, you both invoke the long, hard fight for civil rights for African-Americans, yet without any reference to that movement's main concern: the right to vote. In your column, Mr. Robinson, you fail to mention that the march on Selma was an effort on behalf of voting rights; and your piece, Mr. Herbert, although powerfully recalling the grim history of racist violence against black citizens, devotes not one word to the major purpose of that violence, which was to keep those people disenfranchised.

Such silence is remarkable--especially since, in his acceptance speech, Obama too invoked the civil rights movement in the same bizarrely expurgated way. In pointing out that he was speaking on the anniversary of King's great speech in Washington, the candidate did not make clear, or even hint, that the ultimate concern behind that speech (and the entire event in 1963) was to secure the right to vote for African-Americans.

Now, while it is surely right to celebrate Obama's nomination--and, indeed, apprioprate to shed some tears of joy at this historic hour--it is a grave mistake to see that win as evidence that we've left Selma far behind. It is a grave and dangerous mistake, because the Bush regime has nullified those victories won decades ago, through an unprecedented program of old-fashioned vote suppression and high-tech election fraud.

Under this regime, the very entities that once worked to enlarge the franchise--the Department of Justice, Congress and the Supreme Court--are working now to narrow it as much as possible; and, in collusion with the GOP (both state and national) and Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and a host of other private companies controlled by the Republicans (and often closely linked to the religious right), those three great powers have also made it perilously easy to erase or change those votes that do get cast, or simply to concoct however many votes might be required.

Through such subversive work the Bush Republicans have seized control not only in the White House, but also in the House and Senate, and in several state governments (including those in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia). And now there's every evidence that they intend to do the same thing yet again; and for that, too, "tears are entirely appropriate"--and not just because Obama might well "lose" (despite his popularity). If Rove et al. steal this election, too, it will mean that American democracy is really dead and gone, and no amount of crying will restore it.

What we need more than tears, therefore, is to confront the truth about all this, and let the people know the facts about the Bush regime's election "victories." This is something that the Democrats (or most of them, the party's recent nominees included) will not and/or cannot do. Therefore it is especially important that the media begin to do its job; and so I turn to both of you.

I may be wrong, but I don't think that you, Mr. Robinson, have ever said a word about this issue, either in your column or on television; whereas you, Mr. Herbert, did write an excellent column on it some three years ago. Unfortunately, such long silence is no aberration, since nearly all your colleagues in the US press have likewise kept their eyes closed to this all-important issue, blacking out the topic so completely and consistently that one might think that they'd been ordered not to deal with it. Whatever might explain this silence, you two can help end it at long last; and I promise you that you will be amazed by all the evidence of fraud--staggered by how much of it there is, and by how strong it is--if you will only take a look at some of it.

I would be more than glad to send you a copy of my own new book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008--a collection of 14 essays by a range of first-rate scholars, journalists and activists, on many aspects of the Bush regime's ongoing electoral subversion. I also urge you to get hold of Richard Hayes Phillips' Witness to a Crime, which documents decisively the theft of the 2004 election in Ohio. Phillips studied all the paper ballots in 18 counties, and with his team took thousands of digital photographs, which make quite clear that the Bush machine altered thousands of votes in the incumbents' favor. (The book comes with a CD, so that you can see the evidence yourself. It is available via http://www.witnesstoacrime.com.)

Above all, however, you should check out the revelations of Stephen Spoonamore--a lifelong Republican, erstwhile member of McCain's campaign, and a prominent expert on computer fraud. Spoonamore has copious hard evidence revealing Bush/Cheney stole a number of key races, starting with Florida eight years ago. He has named names, and has the goods to back up every claim; and he knows quite a lot about the plans to make McCain America's next president (which is the reason why he quit McCain's campaign). You can begin to learn more about him, and his testimony, at http://www.rovecybergate.com.

This email is long enough, so let me thank you both for reading through the whole of it. And thanks too for your very moving columns--and for considering how you might help to save this next election, not just for Obama, or the Democrats, but all of us who still believe that We the People ought to rule.

Mark Crispin Miller

Lost Votes and Lame Excuses - Part 1

2008-08-25T16:42:00.009-04:00

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped... (Washington Post, August 21st, 2008)

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years... [my emphasis] The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier [formerly known as Diebold.]

True to form the vendor's first response to complaints from election officials was to blame the state employees and pollworkers.

As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines. It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes. Further testing by Ohio elections officials and then high volume tests by Premier uncovered the programming error.

In the wake of Premier's admission, the Secretary of State of Connecticut announced the widest audit of election results since the state's switch to optical scanner voting machines. One in three machines used in the recent primaries will be audited.

The disclosure is also stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.

McClatchey Newspaper's Greg Gordon provides a run-down of the process which led to the specious certification of electronic voting machines based on "qualified" reports list issued by the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) who relied on the ratings reports of private testing laboratories with whom vendors secretly negotiated payments ... helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements.

The lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed by a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.

The HBO film Hacking Democracy provides a glimpse of the dubious reliability of the testing process as examined by Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris. (Relevant section bgins at 5:30.)

And kudos to New York State Election Commission co-chair Doug Kellner for the quote of the week. Responding to the Premier/Diebold revelations Mr. Kellner said (via McClatchey)it's now clear that a "qualified" rating from NASED is "meaningless ...a piece of toilet paper."

- Joanne Lukacher

In Memoriam: Stephanie Tubbs Jones 1949 - 2008

2008-08-24T20:56:00.004-04:00

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D - Ohio) who in 2004 initiated before the Senate a rare formal challenge to the acceptance of Ohio's electoral votes for George Bush because of voting irregularities, died last Wednesday, August 20th. In this article at OpEdNews, Re-media Election Transparency Coalition Executive Director and Ohio native Rady Ananda offers a tribute to the congresswoman and a retrospective of this historic event and the decisions which preceded it.

- Joanne Lukacher

Why New York's Legislature's Plan to Computerize Our Electoral System Is Unconstitutional

2008-08-12T11:47:00.000-04:00

Overview: Why New York's Legislature's Plan to Computerize Our Electoral System Is Unconstitutional
And Why New Yorkers Need a Lawsuit to Stop It

- Andi Novick

Originally posted at OpEdNews.

SIGN THIS PETITION

For 231 years the success of New York's democratic electoral system has depended on the ability to see how our votes are counted. That transparency is essential to prevent opportunities for fraud, as well as to provide citizens with a rational basis to trust election results and be able to evaluate their government's performance in conducting their elections. We can see how our votes are counted in a lever-counted or hand-counted voting system. We cannot see how optical scanners or DREs are programmed to count our votes, thus concealing the very fraud we must be able to detect and deter.

Attempting to first verify the unreliable software-generated count by hand counting a small portion of the ballots after the election is over, after the press has declared the winner, and after the ballots are exposed to heightened opportunities for post-election ballot tampering has historically been understood to be the least secure way to conduct an election. In fact, post-election ballot tampering has always been seen as so difficult to protect against that since the founding of the State, New York has mandated the election results be reliable, verified, and completed on election night.

It is the exposure of our franchise to these unprotectable opportunities for fraud before, during and after the election, that renders the new electoral system created by New York's 2005 Legislature unconstitutional.

The People Have the Constitutionally Protected Right to Know How Their Votes Are Counted and to See that Fraud Is Prevented

New York's Constitution expressly provides a protected right not to be disenfranchised (Article I, Section 1) as well as an explicit right to vote (Article II, Section 1). These two constitutional rights have been repeatedly interpreted and defined by the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York State, as including implicit constitutional rights that enforce the explicit constitutional rights. These so called correlative constitutional rights include the right to a maximally safeguarded electoral system that provides the greatest protection against even the opportunity for tampering and the right to know that one's vote was fairly counted as cast. In 1909 the Court of Appeals in Deister v Wintermute, 194 NY 99, 108, proclaimed:

The right of an elector to vote is conferred by the Constitution.... [the elector] is entitled to see that his vote has been given full force and effect.... any method of holding an election which would deprive the electors.... of the right of casting their ballots and having effect given to the votes so cast would plainly be unconstitutional. (emphasis supplied)

The right to the protection of the integrity of the election from dilution by fraud and the right to transparency have been the bulwark of our electoral system for New York's proud history– that is until 2005 when New York's legislature enacted laws requiring the replacement of our secure lever voting system with unreliable, secretly programmed software-driven optical scanners or DREs. This new computerized electoral system, now scheduled to go into effect for the 2009 election, violates our laws, ignores our precedence, and unconstitutionally disenfranchises all New York voters.

New York's Constitutional Right to Vote and Constitutional Right Not to Be Disenfranchised Has Always Required that the Electoral System Provide Procedures to Prevent Even the Opportunity for Fraud

In 1888, the United States Supreme wrote in Ex parte Coy, 127 U.S. 731:

The manifest purpose of.... legislation [was] to remove the ballot-box as well as the certificates of the return of votes cast from all possible opportunity of falsification, forgery, or destruction. (emphasis supplied)

For more than two centuries New York's electoral system has required an open, transparent process, which became more open and transparent over the course of the 19th century with the express object of more effectively preventing the perpetration of fraud. To protect this most valued constitutional right, the Court of Appeals explained in Stapleton et al. v Bell, 119 N.Y. 175, 178-179 (1890):

About it have been erected many safeguards, with the object of securing to each qualified elector the fullest and freest exercise of his constitutional privilege, and also of obtaining the greatest protection against the perpetration of frauds at the polls which shall be consistent with a certainty that every person entitled to vote shall have his ballot received, deposited, and counted. (emphasis supplied)

In 1900, the Court of Appeals reiterated in Coffey v Democratic General Committee of Kings County, 164 NY 335, 338:

The settled conviction that safeguarding of our institutions requires the untrammeled exercise of the franchise by the citizens and that the result be protected from fraud, has led to no inconsiderable amount of legislation during the present generation--legislation aimed largely, although not entirely, at the frauds of majorities who, at times, have manifested a disposition to retain their power, let the cost be what it might. (emphasis supplied)

By 1896, New York had enacted a myriad of safeguards that remain with us to this day, aimed at protecting the franchise from dilution by fraud. The Court of Appeals has considered these safeguards necessary to protect our constitutionally guaranteed right to vote and right not to be disenfranchised. But the 2005 Legislature ignored two centuries of case law, disregarded these safeguards in permitting concealed vote counting on software-driven computers, and exposed our elections to existing and new risks of fraud.

Software driven Optical Scanners and DREs Count Our Votes in Secret – Exposing the Election to Unprotectable Opportunities for Fraud

As 231 years of New York's case law reveals, concealed vote counting is a known and open invitation to fraud. Dozens of scientific studies, most of which have come out since 2005 when New York's legislature changed our laws to permit computerized vote counting, corroborate that software is vulnerable to undetectable tampering.
Perhaps in 2005 the Legislature didn't appreciate how insecure these voting computers were, but the evidence is clear and continues to mount. If New York's Legislature will not revisit its decision to abandon our levers for these computers, as of 2009 our elections will be determined by an unconstitutional system that permits our votes to be counted in an unprotected manner, exposing the results to unprotectable opportunities for tampering.

New York's Legislature does acknowledge however, that the "official" software-generated count is too unsecured and uncertain to depend on. That is why the new laws require a partial hand count of the ballots in an attempt to see if there was any basis for accepting the official software-produced results. But checking the vulnerable-to-tampering software count with a post-election hand count, itself known to be dangerously vulnerable-to-post-election-tampering, is the least secure way to run an election. Both the first count and the post-election verification expose our election results to unprotectable opportunities for tampering, historically considered by New York's courts to amount to unconstitutional disenfranchisement of the voters.

Generations of New York legislatures and the Court of Appeals have upheld our right to the most secure electoral process: one which eliminates these unsecurable opportunities for fraud by insisting on a transparent, safeguarded count on election night. For the first time in our history, the legislature has abandoned our constitutionally protected right to the most secure means of protecting the count, instead permitting the official count to be unreliable, unsecured, unknowable and incomplete on election night. When the election is over and the winner publicly announced on election night, it will be impossible for anyone to know with any reasonable certainty whether the 'official' computerized count is accurate, whether it is free from dilution by fraud, or whether the will of the people has been undermined and the election stolen.

For Two Centuries New York's Laws Have Required an Accurate Completed Reliable Count on Election Night: The Days Following the Election Invite Heightened Opportunities for Ballot Tampering Thus Requiring Any Verification/Recount to Be Completed on Election Night

Since New York's founding, our laws have required that the vote counting be conducted in an observable secure manner, subjecting the count to public scrutiny in order to prevent opportunities for tampering. For this reason New York's Election Law requires that the official election results must be accurate and completed on election night and the results publicly "...declared without any bias arising from a knowledge of its effect upon the aggregate result, or from exposure to subsequent influences." McLaughlin v Ammenwerth, 197 NY 340 (Court of Appeals 1910).

A transparent process is required by New York's laws both to provide the greatest deterrence against opportunities for tampering and to prove to the public that their public elections have a rational basis for confidence. A free people must be able to evaluate the performance of their government, particularly the manner in which the legislature conducts the people's elections. The new laws not only permit secret vote counting, but leave us no alternative, hiding from the people the very information they must have in order to retain control over their elected representatives and therefore, ultimately, over their sovereignty.

For more than two hundred years our courts and legislators understood that once the transparency enabled by the poll site conditions ended, opportunities for ballot tampering increased. In fact, the risk of post-election fraud was considered so likely and so difficult to prevent that New York has never permitted the election night count to be subjected to the potential for corruption from post-election tampering. The problem in securing the sealed ballot boxes after election night was explained by the Court of Appeals in Brink v. Way 71 N.E. 756 (1904):

[T]he custody of the boxes is in the officer specified by the law, but he cannot always be personally present to guard them.... Thieves will break through and steal, and no legislative enactment can prevent them. The same is true with reference to guarding the ballots from substitution by interested and evil disposed persons. The result of an important election, state and national, may be changed by the disclosures made upon the opening of one of these boxes. (emphasis supplied)

Recognizing that the heightened risk of post-election fraud could not be sufficiently protected against, New York has always banned post-election recounts: both when we hand counted and now with our lever voting system. Forbidding recounts is an important safeguard in a transparent, secure electoral system that requires we get it right on election night. It protects the securely and publicly counted first count from subsequent corruption. New York built verification into the overall electoral system which included a reliable, accurate first count.

The new laws of 2005, requiring post-election verification of the ballots and potentially a full recount, is a serious breach of our existing observable and theft-deterring system. If we must routinely verify the results after the election is over, the electoral system has failed. Indeed the new system scheduled to go into effect in 2009 is a failed system because it permits the first count to be concealed from the public and vulnerable to fraud. It allows the first count to be unknowable, unreliable and incomplete. It proposes to complete the "official" count with post-election ballots that are likely to have been altered, leaving the true results of the election uncertain and unreliable.

Having Unconstitutionally Permitted the Computerized Election-night Results to Be Exposed to Undetectable Error and Fraud, New York's New Electoral Plan then Seeks to Check these Unknowable 'Official' Results by an Equally Vulnerable Post-election Manual Verification of a Small Portion of the Ballots

Not only has the 2005 Legislature violated our constitutional safeguards and our laws requiring a transparent reliable count on election night, but the means it has proposed to attempt to determine if there was any basis for the legitimacy of the official election night results represents yet another breach of our constitutional safeguards: verification using post-election ballots. New York has never allowed post-election verification because we recognized that the risk of ballot tampering after the election is over is too great to produce trustworthy results.

We in New York have long known that once the election inspectors, poll workers, citizen watchers, party representatives and the press have left the poll sites and the ballots have been sealed and taken away, it is too difficult to guarantee the chain of custody of paper ballots. As early as 1879, the Court of Appeals in Dailey v. Livingston, 79 N.Y. 279, 290 wrote that the risk of post-election ballot tampering is a "far greater evil" than the risk of tampering at the public poll site, held "in the presence of the friends of both parties." The Livingston court recognized that unless the chain of custody of the post-election ballots could be proven to have been preserved beyond "a mere probability of security ... they are not only the weakest but the most dangerous evidence" because how would we know whether "actual tampering or fraud had been committed."

New York's new electoral plan not only unconstitutionally permits our "official" election night results to be knowingly unreliable, but then seeks to verify this undependable computerized tally with post-election ballots that become "the most dangerous evidence" since they will be exposed to increased opportunities for tampering, leaving our "official" results uncertain with no secure means to verify them.

The Heart and Success of New York's Democratic Electoral System Has Been Ensuring the Ability to See How Our Votes Are Counted and Providing Check Points to Deter, Detect and Reveal Tampering

The security of our electoral system is ensured both by making the commission of fraud difficult, but also by providing the means to detect fraud should it occur. The ability for the public and their election officials to be able to detect and observe tampering is essential to protecting our constitutional rights. As described by State Board of Elections Co-Chair Commissioner Douglas Kellner, explaining how our electoral system successfully prevailed to detect and expose tampering to lever voting machines 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.

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. (emphasis supplied)

The ability for regular people to observe tampering and the built-in safeguards designed to enable this detection is the crux of the success of New York's electoral system and is precisely why the planned computerized system is unconstitutional: it is impossible to observe the programming to or tampering of concealed software. Vote counting on software-driven optical scanners and DREs is invisible. Even if the public wasn't literally barred from observing the source code of the software, we still could not see the fraud because software can be programmed to steal our vote and erase itself. It is not possible to sufficiently safeguard such an undetectably mutable system from fraud. Indeed software-driven systems conceal fraud while at the same time exposing our ballots to known and new opportunities for tampering!

By Exposing Our Ballots and the Evidence of How We Voted on Election Night to Post-election Verification, the 2005 Legislature Destroyed Additional Constitutional Safeguards New Yorkers Have Enjoyed: The Preservation of the Evidence of How the People Voted on Election Night

The creation and preservation of evidence establishing how the results were arrived at on election day serves as yet another deterrent against the commission of fraud. We don't allow our ballots to be exposed to post-election tampering because, as the Court of Appeals explained in Brink v. Way, 71 N.E. 756 (1904):

The object of the preservation of the ballots [was to] furnish a further check upon the perpetration of fraud by local boards of canvassers. It accomplishes this, necessarily, because the canvassers know that for six months after the canvass the evidence of how the people voted is to be preserved ... it may be used against the canvassers in criminal proceedings. That, of course, must necessarily operate as a check upon those who might otherwise be persuaded into wrongdoing. (emphasis supplied)

Rather than preserving the ballots, New York's new system, by its routine use in post-election verification, exposes them to the risk of alteration and destruction, removing the deterrent effect the preservation of the ballots was intended to provide.

Moreover, by failing to protect and preserve the people's evidence, the legislature has invited the loss of our only evidence. Without proof of how the votes were actually counted on election night or proof of fraud, the people's right to prevent their disenfranchisement in a court of law is effectively annulled. Although we are constitutionally entitled to seek relief in the courts in order to prevent the loss of our constitutional right to vote, without adequate evidence we are left unable to prove how we voted or to prove fraud.

The computerized evidence produced by software is insufficient to demonstrate how we voted or to prove fraud because it can be undetectably altered. If the paper ballots are also altered in the days and weeks following the election, there is then no evidence of what really happened on election day. An election can be stolen and the people, bereft of sufficient or responsible evidence, will be powerless to challenge the theft in court. This represents the ultimate destruction of checks and balances secured by our constitution, exposing us to the loss of our constitutional rights without legal recourse.

Concealing How Our Votes Are Counted Invites and Enables Unseen Tampering. It Is the Ultimate Constitutional Offense.

What is crystal clear from our case law and legislative history in New York is that concealing any aspect of the canvassing process – before during or after the election – enables prime conditions for fraud and leaves the electorate uncertain as to whether fraud has occurred. The failure to "...guard against the danger and the opportunity for tampering with the election returns" disenfranchises the electorate (Ex parte Coy, 127 U.S. 731, 8 S.Ct. 1263, 1270 U.S. (1888)). Depriving the electorate of the information it needs to determine whether the legislature has satisfied its responsibility to "conduct the election in such a manner in point of form, that the true number of legal votes can be ascertained with certainty" further disenfranchises the electorate. People v Cook, 8 NY 67, 86 (emphasis supplied) (Court of Appeals, 1853)

While the issue of concealed vote counting has never been directly put to our courts in New York – because who would have thought such a thing could even be conceived in America – we nonetheless have direct precedence from the Court of Appeals regarding the worthlessness of any returns (the election night results) produced in a concealed manner. In 1874 during the vote counting, the lights went out. The Court of Appeals wrote in Judson v Thacher, 55 NY 525, 535:

There was a short interval of entire darkness.... The opportunity to commit the fraud existed.... The return was no longer entitled to be regarded. It was rendered wholly uncertain to what extent the fraudulent substitution had been carried, and it was not material whether the inspectors were privy to the fraud by which the uncertainty was occasioned .... [The return was rendered] so uncertain and unreliable that it could not be used for any purpose. (emphasis supplied)

The election return produced from software code, which is not a human language, and which can be altered without detection, is as unreliable and uncertain as the return created in darkness.

Those who cannot remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. How many before us have died to protect the right which protects all other rights? We cannot afford to forget our history. For the sake of the nation suffering under the yoke of unconstitutionally unreliable elections, and for the sake of New York, the last state to have held out against the tide of such disenfranchisement, we have a responsibility to stop computerized vote counting now, while we still can.

Re-media Election Transparency Coalition is fighting to save our constitutionally-compliant electoral system before it is taken from us. Join us -- this fight requires all of us.

SIGN THIS PETITION

Stealing America, Vote by Vote

2008-07-31T15:08:00.000-04:00

A new film on voting in America makes its New York City premier this Friday, August 1st.

STEALING AMERICA, Vote by Vote

August 1st thru 7th at the Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. New York City, NY

SCREENINGS 1:00, 2:50, 5:00, 6:50, 9:00
Q&A's on Friday and Saturday after the 6:50 and 9:00 shows and on Sunday after the 2:50 show

www.stealingamericathemovie.org

Andi Novick of Re-media Election Transparency Coalition and NY VOTERS will be on hand for the Q&A.

Contact your local theater and urge them to show this fim.

NYC Elections Board Hires Spin Doctors

2008-07-30T13:01:00.002-04:00

From Bhopal to Blackwater a p.r. agency whose specialty is grooming the face of corporate inflicted human disaster has been hired for electronic voting “education” in NYC.

NYC Elections Board Hires Spin Doctors for $6.5 million

By Rady Ananda

Originally posted at OpEdNews

Today, the New York City Board of Elections announced its contract with global public relations firm Burson-Marstellar for a $6.5 million campaign to "educate" New York residents about the wholly non securable computerized voting systems NY plans to implement in 2009.

Also today, B-M announced it appointed former U.S. Army Reserve Public Affairs Officer Pamela Keeton as a managing director in its U.S. Public Affairs Practice. Earlier this month, B-M hired Karen Hughes, the former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, as Global Vice Chair based in Washington, D.C.

This $6.5 million expenditure follows yesterday's Financial Control Board meeting where Governor Paterson admonished city workers for "failing to appreciate" the economic crisis faced by the city and the state. Mayor Bloomberg warned that since he expected a $1 billion deficit in FY 2009 and a $2.3 billion deficit in 2010:

"That's why we've put the lid on City-funded spending... We've directed City agencies to be very judicious in identifying where and how to save, in order to maintain our essential services and our economic competitiveness."

The lid has slipped, Your Honor. The NYC Board of Elections cannot justify $6.5 million in promoting a brand new, high-tech, exorbitantly expensive voting system that doesn't work. Nor is it "essential" to switch to a new system when fiscal prudence demands that NYC retain its secure, reliable lever voting machine in light of such grave fiscal deficits.

Burson-Marsteller's Clients :

According to Wiki, B-M's most notorious client is Blackwater USA, the mercenary group alleged to have murdered 17 Iraqi civilians last year. B-M was hired following the September 2007 incident and helped Eric Prince, the company's CEO prepare his testimony before Congress. Though the Iraq Prime Minister's office sought murder charges, Blackwater has never been brought to justice. Blackwater's Iraq contract was extended for another year in April. Apparently B-M did its job.

B-M also headed the PR campaign to dispute allegations of genocide against the Nigerian government, and represented Argentina's military junta government of General Jorge Videla to attract industrial investment.

The military takeover ended a protracted civil war and was hailed by world media as a prelude to peace in Argentina. Burson-Marsteller's client was the Ministry of the Economy. During the Videla government's reign, thousands of Argentine citizens disappeared and many more were tortured for their political beliefs, known as the Dirty War. Burson-Marsteller has maintained through the years that it was never asked by its client to defend human rights violations, but in
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein states:

Victor Emmanuel, the Burson-Marsteller public relations executive who was in charge of selling the Argentine junta's new business-friendly regime to the outside world, told a researcher that violence was necessary to open up Argentina's "protective, statist" economy. "No one, but no one, invests in a country involved in a civil war," he said, but he admitted that it wasn't just guerrillas who died. "A lot of innocent people were probably killed," he told the author Marguerite Feitlowitz, but, "given the situation, immense force was required."

No stranger to defending oppressive regimes, B-M also represents multinational corporations, like:
"Union Carbide Corporation, jointly responsible for the Bhopal disaster that killed some 2,000 employees and nearby neighbors and seriously injured thousands more. The plant was a joint venture of Union Carbide Corporation, a long time B-M client, and the Indian government. While originally operated by Union Carbide, it was taken over by local Indian management prior to the accidental discharge of a deadly gas used in the manufacture of insecticides." (Wiki)

Corporate Watch reports this list of B-M clients:

BP Chemicals - In 1992, it was found that BP's Hull facility discharges twice the level of methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) - a chemical which can cause genetic damage, fetal damage or birth defects at unsafe levels of exposure - into the water than the total amount of MEK released in the United States.

Kerr McGee - owners of a uranium mine in the Navajo Nation, New Mexico. Accused of paying low wages and not informing the workers about the hazardous effects of uranium. Deaths are being recorded every month.

Malaysian Timber Industry Development Council - has felled vast areas of tropical rainforest, particularly in the states of Sarawak and Sabah, threatening the livelihoods of the indigenous peoples who lived there. BM has been hired to "repel falsehood and lies spread by evil-minded environmentalists." However, even the pro-business Malaysian Government has reported that 5 states have over-logged; and although the International Tropical Timber Organisation warned the loggers in 1990 to cut their output to 9m m3/yr it has remained at 16-19m; and at the present rate the primary forest will be finished in 7-8 years.

Monsanto and Eli Lilly - both companies produce the growth hormone BST to increase milk yields in cattle. It has been criticised for risk of infection in the cows, the fact that there is already a milk surplus, and unknown effects of this hormone on human beings. Acting on this concern, state legislators in Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Vermont attempted to enforce labeling of milk produced with, and containing, this hormone. Their efforts were thwarted by Burson-Marsteller acting on behalf of these companies.

Pfizer - a pharmaceutical company accused in 1990 by the US Generic Pharmaceutical Industry of fraudulent and deceptive practices for its failure to report severe side effects of its Feldene drug before it obtained US approval. Listed by the Multinational Monitor as one of the ten worst companies in 1988 for supplying faulty heart-valves. At least 394 of these valves ruptured killing 252 people by 1990. The company has also conducted extensive tests on animals, was listed by a US group as one of the top fifteen corporate contributors to global pollution based on 1987 figures and had one of its plants listed by Greenpeace as one of the ten worst polluters in the South East of England.

SmithKline Beecham - A pharmaceutical and research company which, in the year to March 1991, exceeded its toxic waste discharge quota into the rivers and sea more than 30 times. The company also owns its own animal testing facilities and has been accused of unnecessary cruelty in housing its animals.

Unilever - food, chemical and household goods manufacturer. Implicated in pollution of rivers in the UK and convicted for water pollution offences between 1/9/89 and 31/8/91. Owner of Birds Eye Walls - a food manufacturer which admitted in 1991 to annually importing 30,000 tonnes of beef from Brazil (where much grazing land is felled rainforest). In June 1989, 87 workers at the plant in Sao Paulo, Brazil were fired for occupying the plant in an attempt to achieve better pay and conditions.

Why Is This Heavyweight Corporate Spin Doctor Involved In NY Elections?

New Yorkers reasonably must question why a global PR firm tied to such disreputable companies has been hired for $6.5 million by a cash-strapped board of elections to "educate" voters about the new election system.

Perhaps it's because 50+ scientific studies have proven that software driven voting systems can be hacked without detection. (For 12 fully cited quotes on what computer security experts say about the new systems, see Debunking Pre Election Testing Myths. For top shelf, crème de la crème, most succinct, in-plain-English, best quotes by computer security experts, see Warning: This Product Is Hazardous to Your Freedom.)

Beyond the damning evidence against using software driven voting systems, perhaps B-M was also hired for its specialization in "Grassroots Outreach" where it boasts:

"Our boutique, in-house Communications Center is built to manage larger scale data management and outreach activities directed at individuals and organizations relevant to a campaign.
We can narrowcast messages, or wide-cast them to thousands via strategic online outreach. We deliver products ranging from online targeting and recruitment to managing data for future activations."

Complete Market Failure

As expert spin doctors, B-M no doubt has been set upon New York voters to hoodwink them, despite the fact that software driven voting systems can be hacked without detection, despite their exorbitant price, and despite the widespread failures of these products.

None of the vendors hawking computerized technology meet NY's guidelines for doing business only with responsible vendors . Last year, attorney Andi Novick sent a 60-page, well-researched memo to NY officials, providing details of the shady connections, failed performance, and efforts of vendors to suppress damning evidence of their product. She later supplemented that research with a 21-page memo. Yet, as she points out, NY officials proceed with Eyes Wide Shut.

Sequoia's ballot marking devices (BMD) which allow special needs voters to prepare their own ballot unassisted (when they work) cost $12,000 each. Nassau County reported an 85% failure rate of over 250 machines, while the statewide failure rate stands at 50%. As Nassau County Commissioner William Biamonte said, "Can you imagine buying a $2,000 computer from Best Buy and it doesn't work right out of the box?" The cost for BMDs is sixfold his example.

New Yorkers can resist the move to computerized elections by signing this PETITION, and by following the reports at Election Transparency Coalition.

Joanne Lukacher contributed to this article.

In July 2006, Burson-Marsteller announced a new partnership with the broadcast PR firm The NewsMarket, which produces video news releases for clients. Video news releases (VNRs ) are fake tv news reports which are distributed to television news rooms where they are used interchangeably with independently produced legitimate news stories.
We are awarding a re-media t-shirt to our New York readers who report a sighting of a VNR designed to "educate" New Yorkers about the switch to electronic voting machines.

--JL

Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

2008-07-28T23:39:00.001-04:00

The Fight to Hold on to Our HAVA-Compliant Lever Voting System:
Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

By Andi Novick and Rady Ananda
July 28, 2008

“If citizens mistakenly believe that a court has already ruled against the legality of our lever voting system, they will give up and accept the unconstitutional system planned for 2009.”

Let’s Clear the Air distinguishes the facts from the myths about the status of New York State's electoral system. New York is the only state not to have computerized its electoral system and the only state that still has a secure, reliable, transparent, functioning electoral system. Since New York is in the process of installing ballot marking devices in every poll site, providing an accessible means for voters with special needs to vote independently, there is no justification for the State to abandon its now HAVA-compliant lever voting system.

Software-driven optical scanners and DRE voting systems have proven to be vulnerable to undetectable tampering. New York voters must fight to hold onto their theft-deterring lever voting system before they lose it. New York courts must defend our proud history of transparent, safeguarded, trustworthy elections and proclaim to the State's legislature and to the rest of the nation:

Exposing our elections to the risk of massive tampering using hidden, unprotectable vote counting software is unconstitutional.

Computerized voting systems disenfranchise citizens in numerous ways, including depriving us of the right to know our votes are counted as cast and by permitting the count to be diluted by undetectable fraud. Because New York still enjoys a constitutionally-compliant, viable electoral system, we are uniquely positioned to seek a court ruling on the unconstitutionality of the proposed computerized system.

What happens next in New York will reverberate around the nation. It is therefore critical that we keep these facts straight.

In 2005, New York's Legislature passed the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), determining that it would comply with HAVA by replacing our lever voting system with a computerized voting system. Subsequently, it consented to an Order in federal court, implementing a timeline to replace our levers with computerized "crap" by 2009.

Maybe our legislators didn't realize what they were doing in 2005, but since then, dozens of scientific studies corroborate that optical scanners and DRES are grossly vulnerable to undetectable and massive election fraud. The computerized electoral system planned by our Legislature eviscerates all that was secure, transparent and constitutional about our lever voting system, depriving New Yorkers of the right to a meaningful vote. And yet, New York State proceeds with Eyes Wide Shut.

Petition

The Election Transparency Coalition is a New York based group, formed to preserve open, secure elections. It is prepared to commence legal action to prevent concealed, theft-inviting software from replacing New York's secure, theft-deterring lever voting system. Sign this petition if you agree with us.

If citizens mistakenly believe that a court has already ruled against the legality of our lever voting system, they will give up and accept the unconstitutional system planned for 2009.

We cannot give up.

We are the last state with a democratically-compliant, transparent, trustworthy, non-computerized, non-privatized electoral system. We are entitled to our day in court before we surrender our safeguarded electoral system to one that opens the door to known and new opportunities to fraud. We must fight to preserve our lever voting system now before it is replaced.

Originally posted at OpEdNews

Op-Scans Unlikely to Meet Certification Testing Deadline

2008-07-25T18:21:00.001-04:00

As our readers know, New York State is under federal court order to adhere to a schedule for testing and certifying the software driven electronic optical scanners which will replace our lever machines as a means of counting our ballots. The deadline for certification testing is October 1st 2008. Earlier this month we noted that 85% of the Sequoia Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) purchased by Nassau County were defective. Now, in a public letter, New York State Election Commissioner Douglas Kellner reveals why it is increasingly unlikely that the two Op-Scan systems ordered by New York counties, Dominion Voting Systems Image Cast (marketed by Sequoia Pacific ) and the ES&S DS-200, will meet state certification standards by the target date.

Leaving aside for now the consensus of the scientific community that software based voting machines can never reach acceptable levels of reliability and security, Mr. Kellner's letter, outlining examples of specific problems with these machines, reveals the low to non-existent quality control standards and irresponsible business ethics of the vendors, an assessment which is perfectly consistent with the pattern of behaviour we have discussed previously in these pages.

We can also discern from this letter that the State may soon be under increasing pressure to lower or ignore its own testing standards in the interest of time. We urge the Legislature and the Attorney General to continue to stand firm against such pressure and to use this opportunity to re-examine the legal and/or practical necessity for abandoning the immutable technological genius of our lever machines.

-- Joanne Lukacher

From: Douglas A. Kellner
Date: Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 6:36 PM
Subject: Systest Report on NY Certification Progress
To: "Douglas A. Kellner"

As most of you know, the New York State Board of Elections is doing certification testing on two precinct based digital optical scanning systems, the Dominion Voting System ImageCast (marketed in New York by Sequoia Pacific) and the ES&S DS-200. I believe that ours is the most comprehensive testing anywhere, including that done by the EAC.

The court ordered timetable provides for completion of certification testing by October 1, 2008, which appears to be increasingly unrealistic. The weekly report from SysTest, New York's independent testing authority, excertped below shows just how difficult it would be to meet this target date.

What is particularly distressing is discussion that New York should consider overlooking what some are describing as hundreds of "de minimis" discrepancies from the VVSG or NY regulations. In my view, if they are really de minimis, I do not understand why the vendors cannot address them. I am trying to keep an open mind, but I believe that this may become a major issue within a couple of months as pressure mounts to have us overlook the shortcomings in the interest of replacing the lever machines in 2009. The industry and the Department of Justice will argue that if every other state is using equipment that does not comply with current federal standards, why should New York be the exception?

I believe that there is still strong bi-partisan consensus within New York that we should stick to our policy that newly purchased voting equipment meet all of the currently applicable standards.

This is an excerpt from the SysTest Weekly Report to the New York State Board of Elections:

SCHEDULE RISKS: Time and schedule continue to be the major constraint and risk to the successful completion of this project. SysTest Labs remains committed to providing thorough and complete functional testing, as well as initiating the run-for-the-record test pass in accordance with the current schedule and timeline. However; NYSBOE's ability to meet its court-mandated timeline for complete and thorough testing is at significant risk for the reasons described below.

Issue 1: Test Case Execution. With only 16 working days until the commencement of the run-for-the-record test pass, there remains insufficient time for a complete test pass through the entire test case suite for both initial and regression test passes. Our risk mitigation strategy is to configure five test labs for each vendor, allowing us to execute test cases in parallel. The likely outcome, however, is that not all of the test cases will be completed within the remaining allotted time, and the Vendor's will be unable to address all of the discrepancies discovered.

Issue 2: Documentation Discrepancies. Numerous documentation discrepancies, caused in large part by missing information from both Vendors' documentation, prevent us from finalizing the test procedures in all of the test cases. As of close of business on Tuesday, July 22, Sequoia/Dominion has 148 open documentation discrepancies and ES&S has 414 open documentation discrepancies. Without timely receipt of this missing information and documentation discrepancy fixes, thorough and complete testing cannot be accomplished per the schedule.

Issue 3: Functional Discrepancies. Based on our experience, both as an ITA/VSTL and with the current NYSBOE test project, we anticipate that a large number of discrepancies will be discovered as part of the functional test effort. There is a significant risk, given the remaining allotted time, that the Vendors will be able to address all of the expected discrepancies and SysTest Labs will have sufficient time to regression test the fixes. If a significant number of discrepancies are uncovered, the run-for-the-record test pass will have to proceed with these remaining open.

Issue 4: Hardware/Software Deliveries. SysTest Labs does not yet have all of the necessary hardware and software, which is still being delivered by the Vendors. Moreover, as we configure the voting systems, we are discovering additional documentation and procedural discrepancies.

Issue 5: NYSBOE Approval of Deliverable 7. Based on direction from the NYSBOE, SysTest Labs cannot begin testing without formal approval of Deliverable 7, Voting System Specific Test Plans. Therefore, without timely approval, the start of functional testing will be delayed.

Issue 6: Required NYSBOE Policy Guidance. SysTest Labs requested from NYSBOE policy guidance with respect to the configuration files for both Sequoia/Dominion and ES&S. At issue here is whether the State will allow changes to configurations in set-up parameters for individual counties or whether a single configuration will be mandated. This decision impacts vendor-specific test case development and thus will effect test schedules.

The following is a sample of the Vendor-specific delays that are keeping us from beginning functional testing:
Sequoia/Dominion:
It was discovered while configuring the Sequoia/Dominion EED computer that the election setup procedures do not match the documentation. Sequoia/Dominion reports that the procedures were changed, but the documentation was not updated. Discrepancies have been entered.
Because we do not have documentation from Sequoia/Dominion that tells us how to set up a single tower as a standalone system (all documentation still references the network), the Sequoia/Dominion rep had to walk us through several hours of the installation to get to a point where we could proceed with the current documentation. This document does NOT address several necessary printer drivers and Adobe configurations. Discrepancies are being entered.
Sequoia/Dominion is still delivering and building the voting systems for Lot 1. This is impacting the configuration of the test labs and the start of functional testing.
We are still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to deliver the COTS software to be installed on the voting test computers. This is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for Sequoia/Dominion to send source code mapping, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.
ES&S:
ES&S provided expired licenses for RM COBOL. They are in the process of activating the licenses, but this is impacting the configuration of the test computers and the start of functional testing.
ES&S has pulled all of the VAT A200-00 units from testing. We are waiting for ES&S to deliver updated A200 units for testing.
Some of the equipment for the test computers delivered from ES&S failed (i.e. 2 test computers, keyboards, mouse, and switches). ES&S is replacing the failing equipment, but this is delaying the configuration of the test labs.
The installation of COTS software has been slowed because of missing and/or incomplete documentation and instructions. This is resulting in multiple emails and calls to ES&S and is delaying the configuration of the test computers.
There is no documentation or instructions from ES&S concerning what COTS software is to be installed on the AIMS computer.
Please reference the risks in the Vendor-specific progress report below. SysTest Labs is still waiting for ES&S to send compilers for augmented source code review, information concerning crypto algorithms, additional test hardware, and additional documentation.

I have no objection if you post or forward this e-mail. If you want a copy of the full Systest Weekly Report, please send me an e-mail.

Douglas A. Kellner
Co-Chair
New York State Board of Elections

Tel. (212) 889-2121
Fax (212) 684-6224

Warning: This Product Is Hazardous To Your Freedom

2008-07-20T23:10:00.004-04:00

Voting activist, blogger and citizen journalist Rady Ananda is a senior editor at OpEdNews and Executive Director for Re-media Election Transparency Coalition. Here she and Andi Novick have assembled the " Top shelf, the crème de la crème, the most succinct, in-plain-English, best quotes by computer security experts."

Warning: This Product Is Hazardous To Your Freedom

by Rady Ananda and Andi Novick

Originally posted at OpEdNews.

For full quotes and citations, see Debunking Pre-Election Testing Myths or read the 50+ reports listed in this bibliography.

"...testing to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible."

"...insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election."

"... provides the opportunity for new kinds of attacks, from new kinds of attackers."

"An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive – malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers."

"..., numerous studies have shown that currently deployed voting systems are susceptible to undetectable malicious attacks....”

"Malware in a voting system could be designed to operate in very subtle ways.... be inserted at any of a number of different stages ... from the precinct all the way back to initial manufacture - and lie in wait for the appropriate moment."

"This is a classic computer security problem. Whoever gets into the machine first wins. So if the Trojan horse software is in there first, you ask it to test itself -- it will always lie to you and tell you everything is fine.”

"There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred…”

"...'logic-and-accuracy testing' ... will never be comprehensive; important flaws will always escape any amount of testing."

"The current certification process may have been appropriate [with] a 900 lb lever voting machine ...But software is different. ..[Y]ou cannot certify an electronic voting machine the way you certify a lever machine.... [W]e absolutely expect that vulnerabilities will be discovered all the time....”

"... A certification system that requires freezing a version in stone is doomed to failure because of the inherent nature of software."

"... vulnerability of the system to malware infection and manipulation. ... large possibility that they could implement malicious programming (malware) into the system with little chance of detection. ...could likely spread from component to component throughout the system.”

"... the lack of capability to detect and report potential malware attacks against the system makes it the single largest threat."

Authors' Note:

Do we really want to vote on this "crap?"

Mark Crispin Miller and Hacking Democracy

2008-07-12T19:29:00.005-04:00

Mark Crispin Miller is a NYU professor and author of several books and plays including Fooled Again, an account of the theft and the cover-up of the theft of the 2004 election. Here he weighs in on the op-scan controversy in New York State:

NO op-scans in New York!

As a friend of Bo Lipari, and longtime champion of New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV), I do regret that I must disagree profoundly with them on the matter of how New York casts its votes. While they call for replacing this state's lever system with op-scans, I see op-scans as unacceptable. As computerized machines, they don't permit the sort of open vote-count that democracy requires, but only partial and belated audits--a lousy substitute for the simplest and most honest counting method of them all: one that we can all observe together.

Moreover, those op-scans are manufactured and maintained by the same suspicious private companies that make and service DRE's: Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and the latest incarnation of Sequoia. These companies are as opaque as the machines themselves; and they're in bed with the Republicans. If they were in bed with the Democrats, they would be no more acceptable. The fact is that their very source is tainted, so they have no place here in New York (or anywhere else).

Finally--and unsurprisingly--those suckers can be hacked with ease, and clearly have been. (The New Hampshire primary, where Clinton won the op-scan-counted votes by some five points, while Obama won the hand-counted ballots by a little over six, is only one of many instances of fishy outcomes where they use op-scans instead of DRE's.) As Andi Novick reminds us...the hackability of op-scans was made crystal-clear in HBO's great documentary Hacking Democracy.

Hacking Democracy will be shown on Sunday, July 13th at 2:00 pm at The Muddy Cup, 305 Main Street, Poughkeepsie, NY. Andi Novick will be on hand to answer question about the NY VOTERS litigation and to sign up volunteers.

Mark Crispin Miller will be speaking at Vassar College on September 8th, 2008 in an event sponsored by Vassar College American Studies Program and Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition. Watch these pages for further information.

- Joanne Lukacher

Facts & Myths about Voting in New York State

2008-07-08T22:50:00.013-04:00

Well worth a read: A short checklist of facts and myths about voting in New York State -- where we are, how we got here and where we could be headed -- "Let's Clear the Air" by Rady Ananda and Andi Novick at OpEdNews.com .

- Joanne Lukacher

[Introduction and footnote updated 7-28-08]

LET'S CLEAR THE AIR

By Andi Novick and Rady Ananda

--Optical Scanners and DREs Operate on Undetectably Mutable Software, Depriving New York Voters of the Accuracy and Transparency We Have Enjoyed for More than a Century.

--No Court Has Ever Ruled that HAVA Requires Lever Machines Be Replaced.
Now Let's Go to Court and get a Ruling that Lever Voting Machines are HAVA-compliant so We Can Continue to Enjoy the Security and Transparency Offered by Our Lever Voting System.

Fact: New York has a secure, reliable electoral system that has served the State of New York for more than a century – preventing dilution of the franchise from fraud and ensuring that the will of the people is preserved.

Fact: The lever voting system in New York (and the hand-count voting system as it existed since 1896) provide a transparent process by which many eyes are involved in securing the electoral process, particularly the count. Both systems are designed to detect, deter and expose fraud.

Fact: The State of New York decided that rather than fight the federal government, which would like every state voting on new, budget-breaking, shoddy, vulnerable-to-undetectable fraud, software-driven optical scanners or DREs, it would capitulate, passing laws in 2005 to have New York surrender its secure lever voting system for these unreliable computers. The Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, Chapter 181, §11. (See NY Election Law)

Fact: The computerized voting systems that the federal government claims satisfy the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) - even in their "crappy," theft-inviting condition - disenfranchise those who are forced to vote on them, depriving citizens of the right to a transparent, open voting system and the ability to know that their votes are being counted as cast. See: LitigationSummary.pdf

Fact: These so called HAVA-compliant electronic voting systems are not transparent, concealing from the people the way in which the software is programmed to count our votes. Indeed optical scanners and DREs are nothing more than secret vote counting machines, anathema to any notion of a democratically run election.

Fact: Unlike New York's lever voting machine or a hand-count voting system -- which require a completed, verified count on election night (because exposing the count to the watchfulness of ongoing public surveillance has been considered the most secure way to count our votes for the history of the State of New York), the new computerized systems will abandon the security provided by ongoing public scrutiny and no longer provide a completed, reliable, secure count on election night. NY Election Laws, McKinney's Chapter 17 at New York State Board of Elections.

Fact: New York's lever voting system is far superior to the computerized voting system planned - in terms of transparency, security, expense, reliability, trustworthiness, theft-deterring ability and the protection it provides to New York Voters' constitutionally protected franchise. (See these July articles posted at Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition: Merits of the Lever Machine: A Scholar Speaks Up, and Eyes Wide Shut.)

Fact: The federal government's position is that lever machines are not HAVA-compliant, but no court has ever ruled on this issue because the State of New York never argued this position in any court.

Fact: In litigation commenced by the Department of Justice (DoJ) in 2006 to force New York to become HAVA-compliant, the DoJ claimed lever voting machines were not HAVA-compliant because: a) they could not be made accessible to disabled voters; and b) they don't produce a piece of paper that can be manually audited. While many in New York believed the DoJ's interpretation of HAVA to be an erroneous interpretation, the State of New York declined to put this in issue before the court, having already decided in 2005, before the DoJ sued, that New York will replace our lever voting machines with software-driven machines.

Fact: In 2004 Co-chair and State Board of Elections (SBOE) Commissioner Douglas Kellner testified that our lever voting system is HAVA-compliant but for one HAVA standard - the accessibility requirement.

Fact: In 2008, the State Board of Elections agreed to install ballot marking devices in every poll site and is in the process of completing that, thus complying with the only federal standard New York's lever machines did not meet. Hence, with ballot marking devices in every poll site, there is no longer an impediment to the lever voting system's compliance with HAVA.

Fact: The federal government's remaining objection to lever machines, to wit they don't provide a manually auditable piece of paper, is not true. Our lever voting system does create a piece of paper that can be audited. In any event, this is the DoJ's interpretation of HAVA, but since no court has every ruled on this, it's just an interpretation. It is not what the law says and no court has ever interpreted HAVA as requiring New York to replace its lever machines.

Fact: The State Board of Elections has found over a thousand defects in the ballot marking devices that have been bought for New York and has shipped the counties these computerized machines, many in an unusable state. (See Nassau County Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3, and NY Loves Its Levers as New Systems Fail.)

Common myth: HAVA requires us to replace our levers. It does not.

Common myth: A court has ruled that levers are not HAVA-compliant. No court has ever made any such ruling.

Common myth: New York's electronic voting system will be transparent. It will be anything but.

Common myth: "Auditing" the unreliable computerized results by counting a small percentage (or any percentage) of ballots after the election is over, after the press has announced the winner, after the ballots have been exposed to heightened opportunities for post-election tampering is good enough for a secure, democratic election. This is not true. In fact, using post-election ballots to verify secure election-night results is considered so insecure that New York has never in 231 years permitted post-election ballots to be used to verify secure election-night results, until now.

Common myth: New York State's more stringent certification testing requirements, if complied with, will make optical scanners or DREs accurate and safe to vote on. This is not true. No matter how much testing is done, because software is by its nature mutable, the pre-election testing cannot tell you how the optical scanner or DRE will count the votes.

Since no court has even been asked to rule on the issue of whether lever voting machines are HAVA compliant, and since the computerized voting system New York has enacted is the antithesis of a secure open electoral system, violating in its enactment existing laws, two centuries of accumulated experience and wisdom, and a myriad of safeguards that have protected New Yorkers' "consent" from corruption by fraud, we would hope that the "People's attorney," the Attorney General, would have fought for the People's right to not be disenfranchised. But because Mr. Cuomo's office has decided to side with the State Legislature against the People, the People have no choice but to pursue their own litigation against the State of New York and the State Board of Elections to stop them from forcing us to vote in this highly unsecure and unconstitutional manner.

Our federal constitution is in tatters, our once independent Department of Justice has become a tool of a corrupt federal government hoping to disenfranchise as many people as it can. But New York's state constitution is alive and well and the State of New York's electoral system is vibrant and constitutionally-compliant. New York Voters need to take action to stop the State from abandoning our lever voting system for the theft-enabling computerized system, while we still have a functioning electoral system.

We are the only state not to have exposed our electoral system to increased and unprotected opportunities to unseen fraud. We are the only state with an existing strong, secure voting system. We must stand up to the Department of Justice and its disregard for our laws and our democratic, transparent, reliable voting system. We must stand up to our State Legislature that have caved to a corrupt Department of Justice and violated the rights of the Voters of New York. We must fight to retain what is constitutionally ours before it is taken away.

With your help we will commence this lawsuit against the State of New York. Please tell your neighbors. Please give them the facts. The facts speak for themselves and loudly beg the question–

Why in the world would we abandon our lever voting system?

FOOTNOTE: All of the above lays out why we believe it is critical to keep the facts accurate in the public's mind. Accordingly, we have withdrawn the original footnote to Let's Clear the Air in order to end the distraction over he said/she said. This diverts us from the facts and harms the efforts of all of us who are trying to secure what each of us believes to be the best voting system for New York. We are all entitled to our beliefs. So, in the spirit of respecting each other's beliefs, here are ours:

Based on 231 years of history in New York State, we know what a secure, transparent electoral system requires because we can look at the case law and statutes and see what has worked for New York. Relying on the law as written over the past two centuries:

We believe a democratic electoral system requires that ordinary people be able to observe that the system accurately counts our votes.

We believe it requires that many eyes be able to check each other as we witness the process that results in the count.

We believe it requires the production of reliable, publicly accessible evidence of both how the votes were counted as well as evidence of tampering, should it occur.

We believe a democratic electoral system must be designed to detect, deter and reveal fraud, without which there is no deterrent to committing fraud.

We believe a democratic electoral system must contain safeguards that prevent every known opportunity for tampering.

According to the law as written by successive legislatures and repeatedly interpreted by the highest court of the State, New York's lever voting system satisfies all of the above criteria and has served us well for a century.

New York's new law, ERMA, permits software-driven optical scanners or DREs to count our votes. Computer security scholars and professionals corroborate that software can be undetectably altered before, during and after Election Day, despite the most rigorous certification testing anyone might provide. ERMA, therefore, fails to ensure that the election night count is reliable. All we can do to attempt to verify the uncertain computerized count is manually count the paper ballots, but ERMA requires that the "audit" be done after the election is over, after the results from all other precincts are known, after the press has announced the winner, and after ongoing public scrutiny of the ballots has ended.

The entire history of New York's Election Law, until ERMA, recognized that post-election ballot tampering is so probable that it has never permitted post-election verification of the secure, reliable, publicly observed first count. Under ERMA, not only is the first count (on software) undependable and concealed from the pubic, but the post-election "audit" is also unreliable, since the ballots being hand counted to verify the first count no longer enjoy the security of uninterrupted public scrutiny enabled by the many authorized watchers at the poll site. Under ERMA, the integrity of the verification is impugned, leaving the entire count unknowable and unreliable.

Moreover, since we believe that transparency in a public election demands that many eyes be able to observe the process that results in the count, we are opposed to optical scanners and DREs which hide that process.

Since we believe in the democratic requirement that everyday people be able to witness the process that results in the count, we are opposed to optical scanners and DREs which conceal the count.

Since we believe that a democratic electoral system requires the production of reliable, publicly accessible evidence of both how the votes were counted as well as evidence of tampering, we are opposed to optical scanners and DREs which computer scientists have agreed can be programmed to destroy evidence of the count as well as evidence of the tampering. Without reliable evidence of the count or of fraud, there is no way to challenge the results in a court of law, potentially disenfranchising the electorate and depriving them of their legal recourse to vindicate the loss of their constitutional right.

Since we believe a democratic electoral system must be designed to detect, deter and reveal fraud, we are opposed to optical scanners, DREs, and election management systems which have been shown to be hackable without detection on a massive, outcome-determinative scale, by a single person who doesn't even have to be physically present.

Since we believe a democratic electoral system must contain safeguards that prevent every known opportunity for tampering, and indeed this is what New York's case law has consistently required of the legislature, we are opposed to optical scanners and DREs which subject the count to known opportunities for tampering and expose the count to new and greater risks made possible by software. The highest court in New York has repeatedly found that dilution of the count by tampering amounts to unconstitutional disenfranchisement.

We therefore reject software driven voting systems and demand that New York hand count the ballots marked by accessible ballot markers for voters with special needs, and retain its secure, transparent, and reliable lever voting system, with all the attendant laws enacted to secure the lever count.

Sign this petition if you agree with us.

Eyes Wide Shut

2008-07-05T18:04:00.015-04:00

An Imperative SOS

New Yorkers Struggle for the Soul of Democracy

New York State, the State Board of Elections and New York’s Attorney General are Preparing to Violate Our Constitutional Right to be Protected From Disenfranchisement -- Even as They Know Computerized Voting Systems Cannot Secure our Votes.

At a recent (June 19th 2008) meeting of the four commissioners of the State Board of Elections (SBOE) the discussion focused on the myriad problems New York State is having with the voting vendors who continue to sell the only product they offer – “crap.” As SBOE Co-Chair Douglas Kellner (D) stated:

“[T]he voting industry sells crap. And that's the problem.”

Of course we know that because it’s been well documented. And if we know it, certainly our legislators and commissioners and Attorney General must be familiar with the dozens of independent studies in which computer scientists have repeatedly found that no amount of certification testing is going to make software-driven systems secure enough. Even the National Institute of Standards and Technology, acknowledged :

"[E]xperience in testing software and systems has shown that testing to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible."

Across the nation the vendors have been selling crap that breaks down, is defective, can be easily rigged, and time and again independent computer scientists reveal how easily the scanner or the DRE can be penetrated and corrupted by unaccountable unseen programmers. See www.bradblog.com for ongoing reporting of the nation’s woes as every state suffers from the crap sold by the voting industry. Yet New York,the only state with the benefit of learning from the nightmare that has befallen the other 49 states who bought the snake oil, is proceeding, eyes wide shut.

“BARGAIN WITH THE DEVIL” -The Crappy Ballot Marking Devices Have Thousands of Defects but at Least They Aren’t Counting Our Votes

New York has now bought software-driven ballot marking devices (BMDs) because the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) said that we have to provide a means for the disabled to vote without assistance -- a worthy goal -- but the most able-bodied person in the world couldn’t vote unassisted on these pieces of crap. Still, we have bought what the vendors are selling for BMDs and we are experiencing precisely what everyone else who is forced to buy crap gets -- no surprise there. At this same 6/19th meeting the commissioners were having a lot of trouble with the BMDs because the both the pricey new combo BMD/optical scanner purchased by most of the counties and the less expensive single unit BMD without optical scanner, showed up with thousands of defects in testing by the SBOE. At this point the SBOE is only performing testing for the BMD functioning and not for the optical scanner counting function in order to get the BMDs in every poll site for the 2008 elections.

Last week Nassau County wrote to the federal judge, who’d accepted the State’s shameful surrender of our constitutionally protected right to vote, justifiably complaining that “85% of the 156 BMDs received [so far] ... have substantial operational flaws that render them unusable or that require major repairs”. (see Nassau County's Letter to Judge Sharpe 6/27/08) Nassau blames the SBOE for certifying these machines and forcing them upon the counties. While there’s plenty of blame to go around, the bottom line is the machines are crap; the vendors have a captive consumer and they sell machines that don’t work because the forced consumer feels compelled to have the crap in place for the next election.

And so the state commissioners agreed (at the 6/19 mtg) to relax the rules regarding the BMDs- even as they found literally thousands of defects, because while they may be defective and not work, at least we’re not talking about how vulnerable they are to tampering since these BMDs aren’t being certified to count the votes (yet). But warned Commissioner Kellner, he’s not going to “get caught in this bargain with the devil” when it comes time to certify the scanners to count votes. So what is he going to do when it comes time to certify the counting function on the BMD?

Commissioner Kellner’s efforts are truly heroic, even as he’s wrongly trying to certify equipment that will never be able to safely and accurately count votes. He’s really trying to do the best he can with an impossible situation- the use of computerized voting systems to reliably count our votes. We know he can’t succeed because the evidence overwhelmingly shows that no software-driven voting machine can accurately and safely count votes. It’s not just that the voting vendors sell crap- even if they sold quality computers, software is vulnerable to undetectable tampering. If we had millions of tax payers’ hard earned dollars to burn, someone could conceivably devise more secure software-driven voting machines than these vendors peddle, like Las Vegas does, but it still wouldn’t be secure enough for a democratic election: the software can always be altered without anyone knowing because that’s the nature of the beast (close friend of the devil the SBOE is in the midst of negotiating with).

SOS- (SAVE OUR STATE)– THIS SHIP HAS NOT SAILED

New York State’s Lever Voting System Is Secure, Supported by Most People in the State, and it Works

What is to be the fate of the great state of New York? That at this moment is in the hands of the electorate because our state government has turned against us. Unlike every other state in the nation, we are the only ones who have not yet computerized our electoral process. We are also the only ones with a functioning, secure, reliable and affordable electoral system. Why are we abandoning our levers when they have been described by one scholar studying the issue as “[O]ne of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius.” Why are we casting off a century of wisdom that has shown how the mechanical processes of the lever machine can be relied on for precisely the reason computerized processes cannot be– lever voting machines are designed to prevent and reveal tampering.

Why are we buying crappy, theft-inviting computerized machines?

We have to buy BMDs because HAVA ordered this and because we should try to make these computers work to create ballots for those who can’t pull the lever themselves. But because software is so vulnerable to concealed tampering it has no place counting votes in an open, public electoral system.

New York’s lever voting system deters theft. The federal government’s computerized voting systems invite theft. We can outsmart the criminal Department of Justice that succeeded in pressuring our State Legislature and our Attorney General to agree to surrender our right to vote on secure voting machines. We can have BMDs for creating ballots, but stop there and not pretend these computers can be “certified” to secure the counting of our votes.

New Yorkers have to say NO to the federal government that would have us voting on unsecurable software which can be deployed to steal our precious franchise. NO to our state government that couldn’t find the courage to resist orders from the deceitful administration in Washington. NO to our Attorney General who has the courage to fight deception against crap, but only when it’s being dumped in the Oswego River, not when it’s being dumped on the people of New York. Thanks Mr. Cuomo for saving the river, but what about Saving our State!

SOS: Will anyone stand up for our secure lever voting system that has protected our democracy for a century?

Who supports New York’s lever voting system?

Just about all the county election commissioners in New York, in their personal capacity.
Just about all the state board of election commissioners in New York, in their personal capacity.
And I’d venture to say, most of the citizens of New York.

1) The County Boards of Elections

If you ask the county election commissioners, they will tell you that much as they would love to keep the levers and much as they know the nightmares of computerized voting and the excessive costs to taxpayers, “this ship has sailed.” They are beleaguered. New York State’s Legislature did not stand up and fight for the levers when they had the chance. The State caved- first passing state laws to replace the levers and then capitulating to the pressure of the feds in the litigation commenced by the corrupt Department of Justice agreeing to surrender your rights and the lever voting machine by 2009.

Nassau County Election Commissioner John A. De Grace (R) tried getting the State to stand up for the rights of citizens in his testimony before the SBOE in 2005:

“I can only speak for myself, although I am certain that all other Commissioners in the State of New York feel as impassioned as I do. My main responsibility is to the voters, to ensure that my Board does all it can to implement the law as well as to guarantee fair, just, accurate elections. Up until now I have felt secure and confident that I have been able to do this. Through the use of the Automatic Lever Voting Machines, though aged, I am able to certify election results and I am certain of the accuracy by which we conduct our elections.”

But the State insisted on going forward with its plan to buy crappy, unreliable, undemocratic computers and the SBOE is the State’s executioner. The county election commissioners are following orders from the SBOE. Rather than fighting to Save our System of lever-counted voting (and our democracy) everyone is busy preparing to go down with the ship.

2) The State Board of Elections

If you ask the SBOE commissioners responsible for certifying that these machines can accurately and securely count our votes, they will tell you:

Commissioner Evelyn Aquila (D) at the 6/19th SBOE meeting:
“I support the lever machines”

Newly appointed Commissioner Gregory Peterson (R) at the 6/19th SBOE meeting:

“If it doesn't work the way you said it was going to work [referring to software-driven systems], we're better with a lever-just pushing down levers. And if the judge doesn't understand that [referring to the DoJ’s lawsuit] then he's going to have to be made to understand that.”

But the SBOE does what the State Legislature tells them to do - certify software, abandon the levers. The SBOE doesn’t have to follow orders. Certainly since the Nuremberg Trials this excuse has been explicitly rejected.

Our lever voting system is secure and reliable, protecting the will of the people by preventing dilution of the franchise from fraud. It is a crime to knowingly rob the people of their sovereignty by forcing them to pretend to vote using secretly programmed software that counts votes under the cover of concealment: the perfect breeding ground for fraud. It is, in fact, un-American and unconstitutional.

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 corrupted!

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.

“Our lever machines satisfy all but one of [HAVA’s] standards, that there be at least one machine at each poll site that is 'accessible for individuals with disabilities, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.”

We have met the one standard lever machines could not satisfy. We bought the BMDs. We are paying plenty for our dance with the devil. The bleeding to our wallets and to our democracy must end with the Ballot Markers. We still have our levers. THIS SHIP HAS NOT SAILED.

As Nassau Election Commissioner William Biamonte (D) recently summed it up:

"All that's at stake is the credibility of representative democracy in New York State." See
http://blogs.trb.com/news/local/longisland/politics/blog/2008/06/nassau_vote_board_calls_3_in_5.html
So Who Exactly are We Buying these Crappy Theft-Inviting Machines For?

More to follow soon alerting you to the actions needed to protect us before the State succeeds in disenfranchising each and every one of us.

-- Andi Novick

New York VOTERS v. NY State and the State Board of Elections

2008-07-02T22:27:00.006-04:00

Below is a synopsis of the litigation being prepared by New York VOTERS (Voters for Open, Transparent, Electoral Reliability and Security) challenging the constitutionality of provisions of New York's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) :

- Joanne Lukacher

Synopsis

This litigation challenges the constitutionality of changes to New York’s Election Law, enacted by the Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA), by which the State proposes to replace the lever voting system with computerized voting systems (DREs or Optical Scanners). Because software-generated results are unknowable, the State has proposed compensating for the loss of a reliable count on election night by providing for a post-election verification of the election night tally.

The electoral scheme that has existed in New York for more than two centuries has required an open, conclusive count of the ballots on election night, when the watchfulness of what is now election officials, authorized watchers, party representatives and the press could best deter fraud. To further preserve the integrity of the election, since 1896, the Election Law has required contemporaneously created, reliable physical evidence of the count or of fraud. A verified, completed count, publicly recorded and announced at each poll site on election night, before the aggregate of the total votes is known, continues to be mandated. For 231 years New York’s electoral system has protected the safeguarded election night-count from corruption by forbidding post-election recounts, it being historically understood that once the ongoing public scrutiny of the poll site ended and the results of the election night count were known, the count was at greater risk of subsequent tampering.

The newly enacted legislative scheme represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional reversal of existing and long-standing presumptions and requirements, permitting vote counting for the first time to be performed by concealed, undetectably mutable software, only to be verified after election night in a historically recognized unreliable way. Repeated scientific studies have shown software-driven voting machines to be vulnerable to unseen tampering and incapable of providing trustworthy election results. New York’s Legislature recognizes that the software-generated election-night count is not reliable and proposes to first attempt to verify and complete the count after the election with a partial hand count. Not only does the State unconstitutionally bifurcate the canvass, but its choice of software-driven systems further undermines constitutional safeguards by eliminating contemporaneously created evidence (or any evidence) of the count or of fraud. Indeed, because software cannot be secured, both the ballots and the evidence of how they were counted can be manipulated - leaving no trace of the count or the crime.

Pursuant to ERMA, the State will no longer strive to count every vote: in fact none of the votes will be securely counted. Instead, it will use computers to produce an uncertain count of all the ballots and once the election is over and the results announced, will then check the questionable tally by performing a manual count of a small portion of ballots that may or may not have been tampered, without determining whether those ballots represent the actual ballots cast on election night. The offenses to New York’s Constitution’s express right to vote and the right not to be disenfranchised (Article I, § 1, Article II, § 1) have been further exacerbated by the State’s failure to even consider constitutional due process procedures to determine chain of custody of the post-election ballots. This is particularly abhorrent in light of New York’s historic presumption that the risk of breach to the chain of custody is so high that post-election ballots have never been permitted to be used as a means to verify the secured election-night count.

The State has, until now, understood its responsibility to provide open, secure procedures in order to both safeguard the election and to demonstrate to the public that every vote is being counted as cast; to prove to the people that the election results are worthy of public confidence. Anything less has been recognized and condemned in the case law as unconstitutional disenfranchisement. First Amendment principles, also guaranteed by New York’s Constitution Article I, § 8, protect the public’s right to an open electoral process, essential for people to be able to evaluate the performance of their government in conducting public elections. There is no way for the electorate to know their votes have been reliably counted by software that has been shown to be vulnerable to exploitation outside the public’s view.

The proposed electoral system renders election officials’ historic oversight duties impossible to perform, creating a system in which undetected errors or willful frauds are not adequately restrained and the evidence of fraud is either exceedingly difficult to obtain or non-existent. There is precedence finding the constitutional inadequacy of such a system. At the turn of the last century, similar concerns in a less vulnerable electoral system - wherein a limited number of people had unobserved control over the count, had the ability to destroy evidence of fraud, and were not required to preserve evidence of the count - required the enactment of numerous safeguards to correct the deficiencies that had rendered “[V]oting … a useless formality as it depends upon the will of the inspectors of election…and not upon the vote of the people.” The safeguards instituted in 1896, still protecting the franchise to date, were designed to prevent the dangers wrought by precisely the type of electoral system ERMA invites, wherein the will of the people can be thwarted by the unobservable control held by a few private vendors and government insiders. These safeguards are fatally destroyed and effectively nullified by EMRA.

The public's right to the creation and preservation of responsible information to prove the election results as well as all of the fraud-deterring safeguards that have accumulated over the past two centuries will be sacrificed to secret, proprietary processes controlled by private vendors insisting that the public be prohibited from observing the very information required of an open, democratic society. Legislatively mandated procedures, which have demonstrated the reliability of the mechanical lever and hand-count voting systems, are abrogated by software-driven systems. Public scrutiny, fundamental to oversight and accountability, are eradicated by the new statutory scheme, depriving citizens of their constitutional right to an open, observable, reliable, completed count on election night.

The proposed computerized electoral system has been demonstrated to be far less secure and far more vulnerable to fraud than New York’s existing lever voting system or hand-count voting system, and further exposes the count to massive unprotectable risks exclusively made possible by the use of software. The case law has consistently found the removal of those safeguards which have protected the count from dilution by fraud to be unconstitutional. The legislature has the affirmative duty to protect the right of suffrage from any and all opportunities for fraud. The 2005 Legislature abdicated its responsibility in enacting legislation permitting the use of un-securable theft-enabling software driven voting systems.

The complaint also seeks a ruling that in light of the State’s providing Ballot Marking Devices in every poll site, the lever voting system is HAVA-compliant.

- Andi Novick

Nassau County Receives Defective BMDs

2008-07-02T20:28:00.009-04:00

The Nassau County Attorney's Office has written to federal Judge Gary Sharpe of the Northern District Court to inform him that compliance with the court's order in United States of America v. New York State Board of Elections et al is seriously threatened by the failure of their newly purchased disabled accessible ballot marking devices. "Fully 85% of the 156 BMDs received by Nassau through June 26th, 2008 -- after the SBOE acceptance tested them in Albany -- have substantial operational flaws that render them unusable or that require major repairs." [Note: clicking on the letter page images should enlarge them]

Joanne Lukacher

The Merits of the Lever Machine: A Scholar Speaks Up

2008-07-02T10:32:00.003-04:00

As an alternative to the fatally flawed electronic voting machines (DREs and Paper Ballot Scanners) New York already has in place a tried and true old workhorse -- the mechanical lever machine. Andi Novick will be blogging on this in a future post but first I would like to share an email from anthropologist and lever machine expert Professor Bryan Pfaffenberger of the Department of Science, Technology and Society at the The University of Virginia.

Dear Andi,

I've received a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation to study the history of lever voting machines, a subject that has never been studied by a scholar with professional training in the history of technology (or in any other discipline, for that matter). I am currently writing a book tentatively titled Machining the Vote, which covers the history of lever machines from their invention in 1888 to the bankruptcy of the leading manufacturer, Automatic Voting Corporation, in 1983. Highlights of my findings:

1. 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. With as many as 28,000 parts, their mechanisms reflect an agonizingly difficult period of development, spanning more than twenty years (1888-1919) in which interlocking mechanisms had to be developed that were capable of dealing with the enormous complexity and variety of American elections. The result was a machine that captures in its immutable mechanical operations the voting rules that the American people, in their wisdom, developed in order to capture the will of the people.

The mind balks, perhaps, at the suggestion that a century-old technology might be the equal of today's best technologies -- or even superior! -- but the fact is that the lever machine is not alone. U.S. freight railroads continue to use electromechanical signaling systems that were, coincidentally, developed during almost exactly the same frame (1890s-1920). There is no sense of urgency to replace them. Their reliability has been proven in a century of service. They are perfectly adapted to the conditions of American railroading. They are easily understood and maintained by technicians with modest educational backgrounds.

2. Time and again, as I mentioned earlier, lever machines won the confidence of election officials and the public, even when doubts were expressed. I'd enjoy sharing the New York story with the commissioners. By 1925, most of upstate New York was voting on lever machines quite happily, but New York City - led by Tammany Hall Democrats -- resisted. New York's first activist Attorney General, Albert Ottinger, vowed to impose lever machines on the city whether Tammany liked it or not -- and by 1926, they were used throughout much of the city. The 1926 election proved to Republicans that, contrary to their suspicions, the New York City Board of Elections had been running fairly clean elections -- the much anticipated, 50,000 vote payoff did not materialize. At the same time, Democrats realized that the machines did not amount to a Republican plot, since Democrats won squeaker elections in districts that normally lean Republican. Suddenly, the voting machine controversy in New York City ended abruptly. Election officials elsewhere had been watching this drama and, when it reached what all agreed was a happy conclusion, voting machine adoption took off throughout the country. Throughout all the years of the Depression, even, the voting machine business was profitable and AVC paid dividends to shareholders. By 1960, about 60 percent of the voters in the U.S. cast their ballots on the machines. In that year, of course, Kennedy narrowly defeated Nixon, leaving Republicans convinced that corrupt Democratic election officials in Chicago and Texas were to blame. In Chicago, the controversy was almost entirely focused on the precincts where paper ballots were still in use. In contrast, where lever machines were used, there were few irregularities. Had lever machines been in use throughout Chicago, it is possible that our nation would have survived the 1960 without generating a politics of payback that continues to this day.

3. Although lever machines do not produce an independent audit trail, this is -- as software engineers say -- a feature, not a bug. In the 1880s and 1890s, paper ballots emerged as the locus par excellence of election fraud; lever machines were expressly designed to take the human element out of every aspect of the vote recording and counting process in order to eliminate fraud that was gravely undermining Americans' confidence in their democracy. It is quite astonishing to realize that, while the lever machine was under development, inventors came up with just about every voting machine concept that has since been realized, including precinct-scan punchcard technologies, ballot printing machines, and even electromechanical systems that can be seen as predecessors of computerized technologies. All of these technologies produced paper records, however, and all were flatly rejected, both by voters and election officials, as letting the possibility of fraud in through the back door. Today, there are widespread calls to bring paper back into the picture, but the reason is that people do not trust the machines.

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 -- unfortunately, the American people have forgotten the lessons they learned a century ago, and I greatly fear that we will have to repeat them in order to learn them again. The truth of the matter is that our American election system, in contrast, to the election administration systems of most advanced democracies, is inordinately decentralized, less than professionally administered in many instances, and politicized. 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.

Bryan Pfaffenberger
Department of Science, Technology, & Society
University of Virginia

Professor Pfaffenberger bio:

An anthropologist by training (Ph.D.: University of California, Berkeley, 1977), Bryan Pfaffenberger has been committed to science and technology studies for more than two decades and has received international recognition for his scholarly work in STS. He is the winner of the Albert Payson Usher prize (1989) for this essay, "The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes" (Technology and Culture) and the American Society for Information Science's Book of the Year award for Democratizing Information (G..K. Hall, 1989). In addition, he continues to work in the anthropology of technology, recently described by a leading anthropologist as the first successful new subfield of anthropology to have been created in a quarter of a century. His work, including a key 1994 essay titled "The Social Anthropology of Technology" (Annual Review of Anthropology), helped both to create the new subfield and provide it with rich theoretical tools. Pfaffenberger's current interests focus on the social analysis of computing, including electronic voting and the impact of a rapidly expanding U.S. intellectual property regime on engineering, science, and technology.

posted by Joanne Lukacher

New York State & The Sequoia ImageCast

2008-05-02T22:01:00.008-04:00

In fulfilling the HAVA requirement to provide a ballot marking device (BMD) to accomodate voting by the disabled, the vast majority of New York counties, including Dutchess, have chosen the Sequoia ImageCast which combines a BMD which creates a paper ballot with an Optical Scan (OpScan) tabulator. Currently only the BMD portion of the machine has been certified for use in New York State. The votes cast on paper ballots using the BMD in the November 2008 elections will be hand-counted, while non-disabled voters will be allowed to cast their votes on the familiar lever machines. One of the reasons for choosing the Sequoia ImageCast is the anticipation that its OpScan component will be certified for use by the 2009 elections when it will be used to count the paper ballots which will be used by all voters.

It seems useful at this point to examine the background of this company to which, if the OpScan is certified, we will essentially be handing the outcome of our elections. According to a Memorandum prepared by attorney Andi Novick entitled New York State Law Prohibits the State From Entering Into Contracts With Any of The Vendors Under Consideration, Sequoia has been repeatedly accused of lying and misrepresenting itself to the the various state officials with whom it has done business. The company's agents have been charged and convicted of bribery and money laundering in kickback schemes with an election official in Louisiana. Purchasing agents working for the states of California, Colorado and Nevada were hired by Sequoia as employees after awarding the company large state contracts. Voters Unite has compiled a 27 page list of Sequoia Voting Systems machines failures, but when confronted with problems Sequoia's usual response is to apply an adjustment which is nothing more than a placebo or to deny responsibility altogether as when the company blamed tabulation problems with software in Chicago on the local pollworkers. As Novick describes it, the exhaustive voting systems review conducted for the California Secretary of State in 2007 found that:

Not only did Sequoia'a voting systems lack the security necessary to provide accurate and reliable elections but Sequoia's ethics and integrity was again seriously impugned by the California Report which found that Sequoia's security system essentially consisted of a dishonest customer relations campaign. The California Report has now corroborated Sequoia's fraudulent and false representations exposing not only Sequoia's unethical conduct but its willingness to lie to conceal the fact that its voting system provides an open invitation for the manipulation of our elections.

In 2008 an executive with Sequoia Voting Systems, wrote a two-page letter threatening Union County , New Jersey with a lawsuit if the county clerk proceeded with plans for an independent study by a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. That is to say that the county would be sued if it sought to understand and test the reliability of its own voting machines.

In conducting an investigative report on electronic voting, journalist Dan Rather recently uncovered a previously unreported connection between Sequoia and the contentious 2000 election. Rather interviewed 7 former employees of Sequoia who revealed that Sequoia switched to inferior and rejected paper which pre-election testing by Sequoia had showed would produce defective punching patterns and hanging chads on the card machines used in many states in the 2000 election. The paper, which had been refused and sent back by Sequoia employees, was brought back in and signed off for by plant managers. The paper was not only different from the paper used in other elections, but was known not to perform well in high humidity conditions, like Florida.

Rather revealed that more than 50,000 Sequoia punch cards were discarded as invalid because it appeared voters had over voted and on 17,000 of the Sequoia cards, voters seemed to have voted for three or more presidential candidates. In Palm beach County, 10,000 citizens apparently showed up to vote but decided not to vote for the presidential election. Not only were tens of thousands of citizens disenfranchised, but Sequoia has enjoyed huge sales increases as its punch cards were replaced by computerized voting machines after the 2002 HAVA response to the problems in Florida.

Sequoia, which is currently fending off a hostile takeover which would further consolidate the extremely small field of voting machine vendors, is owned by Smartmatic, a Venezualan company with ties to the Venezualan government. Recent investigation by Brad Friedman has revealed that despite assurances to The U.S. Treasury that the company has been sold to its U.S. management team, Smartmatic still holds direct and/or indirect control over several key aspects of Sequoia's operation, including ownership of the intellectual property (IP) rights for Sequoia's voting machines and tabulator software...

Since all electronic voting machines, both DREs and OpScans, operate on secret proprietary software owned by the corporate vendor not by the election commissions which own the machines, this essentially means that with Sequioa machines our votes will be counted not just by a corporation but by a foreign corporation with ties to a foreign government. With secret and easily manipulated corporate vote counting it is not difficult to imagine agendas other than the will of the voters being served. How comfortable would we feel if , for example, Halliburton or Blackwater became the major shareholder in the corporation counting our votes.

Sadly Sequoia's background does not distinguish it from the other major voting machine vendors seeking to do business with New York. Both Novick's Memorandum and a simultaneous report prepared by Voters Unite conclude that under the State Finance Laws and under the Vendex rules which are the State Comptroller's Procurement and Disbursement Guidelines all of the vendors under consideration fail to meet the requirements for "responsible" contractors and should be barred from doing business in the state. New York State is enjoined from doing business with contractors who lack integrity or whose past performance is wanting, therefore none of the voting machine vendors with whom New York is considering doing business are eligible for contracts under state law.

So how did we reach this point and why are we considering purchasing these machines?

Joanne Lukacher

Lever Machines - Who Says They Are Illegal?

2008-04-27T08:22:00.014-04:00

One of the first questions most people will ask when confronted with warnings about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Touch Screen voting machines and Optical Scan ballot counters (Op-scans) is: "But aren't these analogous to banking at the ATM, and aren't scanners used to mark standardized tests? Both are used on a regular basis without a problem." Indeed, one vendor/manufacturer of ATMs is also a purveyor of Touch Screen and Op-Scan voting systems, although both the Touch Screens and the Op-Scans are generally much more shoddily made and engineered than your average ATM. The difference is transparency. If your money suddenly and unexpectedly disappears you are immediately aware of the loss. If your vote is lost or changed, you would never know. A little thing called the secret ballot really complicates things!

Two simple and comparatively reliable alternatives to computerized vote counting are the hand counting of paper ballots (HCPB) and the continued use of lever machines. Most presentations on HAVA (Help America Vote Act of 2002) compliance begin with the assertion that Lever Machines are now illegal and must be replaced by electronic voting machines. However, according to 2004 testimony by New York State Board of Elections Commissioner Doug Kellner:

The federal Help America Vote Act, 42 USC §§15301 et seq., will require substantial changes in election administration for the 2006 elections. In particular, 42 USC § 15481, sets minimum standards for voting machines. 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, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.

Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) which will comply with HAVA's standards for disability access and will produce a paper ballot for the disabled voter have now been approved for use in New York State. As required by HAVA one such device will be available at each polling place for the November 2008 elections. Non-disabled voters will continue to use the lever machines in November 2008 or may choose to use the BMD . These BMD paper ballots will be hand-counted in 2008 but most county election commissioners are anticipating the use of Op-Scans to count paper ballots for all voters beginning in 2009.

ReMediaETC in upcoming posts will be demonstrating the risks to our democracy posed by computerized vote counting and, in challenging the security and lack of transparency of Op-Scans, will argue that the continued use of lever machines is legal under HAVA and should be used until it is determined that New York is in need of some other transparent and secure means of counting our ballots

Here is Commissioner Kellner in an interview from 2005:

Machines similar to today's lever machines were at the center of a voter-fraud scandal in the 1940s. The machines had mechanical counters similar to odometers that recorded how many votes were cast for each candidate. Some of the people responsible for counting the votes used pen knives to change the counters and thus the votes. Similarly, the counters used on today's machines could be adjusted prior to the opening of polls to provide an artificial advantage to a candidate. Unlike e-voting machines, which have all of its inner-workings hidden away as code, the working parts of lever machines are exposed to the world. 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.

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.

The Hand Counted Paper Ballot Alternative will be discussed in an upcoming post.

- Joanne Lukacher

Mission Statement - Counting the Ballots in New York State

2008-04-26T20:46:00.012-04:00

The Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition was formed in response to New York State’s committed direction of replacing its lever voting system with computerized voting systems in 2008 or 2009.

While any voting system is subject to illegal manipulation the mechanics of our existing lever machines and the procedural safeguards which have been put in place have served us well. Illegal tampering with a lever machine is rare and easily detectable and while it may call into question the results from a single machine the effect is minimal relative to the potential for undetectable wholesale fraud which is possible on a single electronic vote counting machine. Manipulation of either a Direct Record Electronic touchscreen machine (DRE) or Paper Ballot Optical Scan machine (PBOS) can alter the outcome of an entire election. That is, a single person can rig the results of the whole state!

The right to vote is the most important of the rights inherent to a self-governing society. All of our inalienable, civil and political rights rely on our ability to elect or abolish our government. Since the founding of the State of New York the right to vote and to have our votes counted has been protected by a myriad of safeguards that rely on public scrutiny and access to information to provide a check against the abuse of power and the means for the people to evaluate how the State carried out its responsibility to count our votes and protect the integrity of the franchise. All of that will end if the State proceeds with its plan to let computers count our votes.

Every other state in the nation has switched to some form of computerized voting on either DREs or OpScans and the results have been disastrous. It is still possible to prevent this catastrophe in New York State. Over the past year Re-media has engaged in a variety of activities to educate and alert citizens and public officials to both the dangers of the path we are on and alternatives to safer and simpler non-corporate controlled secret vote counting. These have included public forums, film screenings, writing articles to better inform the public, intervening by way of an amicus motion in the case of the US Department of Justice vs New York State, and email communications regarding articles and actions. The efforts have been time consuming and expensive. We are preparing to commence litigation against the state of New York to prevent the evisceration of two hundred years of an observable safeguarded electoral system.

We need both money to pursue the litigation (legal expenses including transcripts, filing fees, depositions, etc.) additional lawyers and volunteers who are willing to support our efforts through letter writing and by their physical presence in a courtroom.
Donations may be made to the Coalition at Velvet Revolution . To add your name to our list of supporters contact joanne@re-mediaetc.org .

PLEASE JOIN US