OpEd News Interview With ETC's Joanne Lukacher

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

"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.

Happy Valentines Day Lever Machines

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)

County Government Committee of Columbia County Supports Joining Litigation

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.

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

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.

Greene County Lever Resolution

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.

Give Me A Lever And A Place to Stand

"Archimedes asked only for a lever and a place to stand, and he would move the world." -- John Mason, Hudson-Catskill Newspapers

Please forward this to every New Yorker you communicate with -- Conservative, Liberal, Green, Independent, Republicans, Working Families, Democrats, etc. All have one thing in common:
We want our votes to be counted.

New York has the last transparent, secure, accurate and reliable electoral system left in the nation. Join citizens, county legislators, county election commissioners and political parties in saving our lever voting system!

Here's how:

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

Dutchess County Passes Resolution to Retain Lever Voting Machines

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

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

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.