New York: Last in HAVA Compliance or First in Election Integrity?

[Wilms]

New York: Last in HAVA Compliance or First in Election Integrity?

You've read about it in the press, seen it on the Internet, perhaps even blogged about it yourself, but what's really behind New York's reported tardiness in complying with the Help America Vote Act? Perhaps it's the State's preoccupation with election integrity.

By Howard Stanislevic, VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project

June 27, 2006

The history of New York's purported non-compliance with Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is a long one. Much has been made of HAVA's lack of requirements for voter-verified paper audit records (VVPARs) or paper ballots that can be used to allow independent verification of e-voting system tallies produced by Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) and Optical Scan (OS) systems (paper ballots provide this capability inherently of course). But bills in the New York State legislature from both sides of the aisle have required VVPARs with random audits since at least 2004. New Yorkers may be stubborn but they're not stupid.

It would be patently absurd to replace a transparent, statewide, non-proprietary, low-tech mechanical lever voting system that even prevents write-in overvotes and can only be corrupted the old fashioned way -- one machine at a time -- with opaque, proprietary, computerized e-voting systems, programmed en masse by as few as a single insider, with no means of independent verification whatsoever. And contrary to popular belief the potential for programming error or malfeasance applies equally to DRE and Optical Scan technologies. Fortunately, the independent verification issue was resolved here years ago; the legislature declared, "There shall be paper." So too was the issue of source code escrow, which recently prompted at least one major e-voting vendor (Diebold Election Systems) not to compete in the state of North Carolina. As in the Tarheel State, the escrow of vendors' proprietary software has been a requirement in New York's legislation for years.

New York law also requires the testing of every e-voting machine or system in the state approved after 1986 with at least 800 votes per year. While some may consider this excessive it's not burdensome to do with optical scanners. However, it should be noted that a typical ballot can have literally trillions of valid vote combinations, all of which cannot be tested. This is one reason why New York law also provides for party representatives and others to audit the ballot definition programming generated by election management systems. The significance of this statute is something that even some in the election integrity community do not yet fully appreciate.

In numerous states we have seen incidents of miscounted races, the outcomes of which were reversed by errors or misconduct affecting ballot programming (also known as election configuration, ballot definition files and election definition). Clearly New York and all other states need to be able to audit this data before it's loaded onto their voting systems for each election and vendors must be required to provide a means for doing so on every machine or scanner to ensure its correctness. New York provides for this, including a formal definition of the Election Configuration, in its latest Voting System Standards approved unanimously by the State Board of Elections last April. After all, verifying the ballot definition can easily be done by any poll worker with a lever machine simply by inspecting the ballot face. Unlike e-voting systems, with lever machines what you see it what you get.

snip/links

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1436&Itemid=113

[Greeby]

1. The Green Papers NY page for all the races

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/G06/NY.phtml

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. Its crazy, but levers are starting to look really good

I would love to know the net annual operating expenditures
for NY counties that use levers.

It has to be miniscule compared to the costs associated with
optical scan or DREs.

Plus, vendors are trying to screw their customers with
a new, twice as expensive paper ballot for the optical scanners.

At least on ES&S they are.

[Peace Patriot]

3. New York would be nuts to permit its votes to be counted by Bushite

corporations using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, in an election system deliberately designed to be non-transparent and unverifiable, engineered by the biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney. In fact, we all would be nuts to let that happen, wouldn't we? Hm-m-m. ARE we nuts?

[kster]

4. I seconded that

New York would be nuts to permit its votes to be counted by Bushite corporations using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, in an election system deliberately designed to be non-transparent and unverifiable, engineered by the biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney. In fact, we all would be nuts to let that happen, wouldn't we? Hm-m-m. ARE we nuts? K&R.........

[Bill Bored]

5. Don't forget those partisan elections administrators!

You don't need that!