NY: Why push electronic voting machines? Follow the money trail

Why push electronic voting machines? Follow the money trail

Stephen H. Unger • January 27, 2008

By not rushing to adopt the "latest" voting technology, New York has, so far at least, avoided the disasters that have befallen more punctilious states such as Florida, Ohio and California. Expert studies have shown that the quality of all commercially available e-voting systems is abysmal, and that they are vulnerable to large-scale fraud.

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The first three points do not apply to "optical scan" systems, where voter-marked ballots are fed into machines for tallying. They are, therefore, not as bad as touch-screen machines. However, they too can be corrupted and, due to the lack of recount rules, we cannot rely on recounts of paper ballots to correct or deter fraud.

The old lever-type voting machines used in New York and New Jersey have not caused serious problems. Recording errors can occur for individual machines, due to mechanical problems, but these don't seem all that common. A fundamental shortcoming is that there are no provisions for paper audit trails. However, wholesale fraud, possible for both touch-sceen and optical-scan machines, is not an issue.

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Because, on average, elections are infrequent, voting machines, unlike computers used for most other purposes, are used only a few times a year. This explains the surprising fact that e-voting elections generally cost more than manual count elections. Costs are inflated by the need for testing prior to each use, maintenance, programming of ballot definition files, secure storage and transportation.

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Although staffing manual-count elections can be problematic, good solutions exist. In New Hampshire, high school students are added to a mix that also includes senior citizens. Some Nebraska counties treat election work as a civic obligation akin to jury duty. In Germany, polling place staffs include civil servants on detached duty from their regular jobs. So why isn't everybody rushing to adopt manual counting? One important reason is that there is no money in manual systems, whereas big bucks can be made by lobbying politicians to sell e-voting systems. State and local officials would be wise to ignore the hype, and take a realistic look at risks and costs.

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http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080127/OPINION/801270311/1076/OPINION03

I spend my election days as a NY election inspector, and hate the thought of paper ballot counts. As it is, when there are too many absentee ballots we send them to the County office for them to handcount since it would take us too long.

My county also has a hard enough time finding people to work the polls and has offered bonuses for some areas. The thought of four people, when you can find them, counting up to a thousand ballots per ED after working a 16 hour day is a lot scarier than the hand count proponants would like to admit-- evidence that they know little about the actual process of vote tallying. And, you'll note, it's not just President people vote for, but there could be a Governor, Senator, Congresscritter, several other state offices, mayors and other county and local positions-- with many of these running on more than one party line. And a dozen or so propositions, state Constitutional amendments, and godknowswhatelse someone decides to put on a ballot. And then reading illegible writeins.

Sound like fun making sense of all this after a 16 hour day? If so, you can have the job.

Looks like we'll be getting scanners for '09, and that's probably a good thing. The lever machines have served admirably for years, but they're at least 40 years old and getting tough to maintain. Scanning technology is mature and has been working since GM ran the company off of IBM punchcards.

The lever machines, btw, DO have something as good as an audit trail for recounts-- they are locked and sealed before being sent back to the warehouse so nothing can be changed in the event of a recount.

Absentees are mailed to the county. Why would they exist at polling places in NY in the first place? Are you talking about provisional ballots or what?

The point of a paper audit trail is to mitigate the risks posed by software-dependent electronic vote-counting. There are other reasons, but that's the primary one. While levers may fail occasionally in small numbers, leaving their telltale undervotes (which we rarely see in NY), it's virtually impossible for enough of them to fail, or to be rigged, to change the outcome of a major election run on many machines with decentralized control and "programming." But it's nice to hear that the locks are better than the ones on scanners and DREs!

If you read NY Election Law and HAVA carefully, there is no requirement to ban lever machines. This has yet to be argued very effectively in court however.

ED in the kit. This is automatic. It makes it less complicated when calling in the tallies to call in the absentee ballots, too.

We might send them unopened back to the county, depending on the county's instructions. Slow elections we almost always count them ourselves, but there have been times when some areas were overwhelmed and so all were sent back to the county. Provisonal ballots are counted at the polling place.

I'm not privy to all the discussions over new machines, but there are court orders involved and the lever machines are slowly falling apart anyway. The damn things weigh a ton, too, and are a bitch to store and move around every election day.

Why would scanners need locks? Any recount or error checking would go to the original ballots, with the machines merely interim counters.

What exactly do you think would trigger a recount with these scanned paper ballots? What would lead anyone to believe that a recount was necessary?

Suppose the 3% audit doesn't find anything wrong? Then what? The election is certified after the scanner tapes are read a second time in the warehouse, like the levers. And that's that.

The reason why you'd want to have LOCKS and things on scanners is that, with 2000-3000 ballots on a single memory card, you can switch a LOT of votes around on a single scanner! That's like 4 lever machines' worth of votes. It's as simple as that.

I think you should do some reading about this if you have time.

Start here:
http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/Reports.html

Then read this:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=798&Itemid=51

And then read some of the stuff about scanners they found in Ohio:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/everest.aspx

That's just for starters.

Thanks for working the polls by the way! If there were going to be hand counts, I certainly think they should be done by a second shift!