In USA v.
New York State Board of Elections, et al. (US District Court, Northern
District of NY, Civil Action No. 06-CV-0263), the politicized Department of
Justice, which has done everything in its power to undermine its mission to
defend the right to vote, argued in motion papers filed on Election
Day, that even though no electronic voting systems exist that meet NY's
voting technology standards (and, indeed, none meet federal standards either),
NY must use this flawed and repeatedly proven failed technology. In essence the
federal government's position is this: it doesn't matter that the voting machines
being sold by irresponsible private vendors have been proven to be hackable in
less than a minute, they still comply with the Help America Vote Act so NY
should buy them in time for the 2008 elections.
California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen,
recently conducted the largest independent top-to-bottom-review of these voting
machines and the results were devastating, exposing both Paper Ballot Optical
Scan and touch-screen DRE systems’ “inadequacy to ensure accuracy and integrity
of election results.” Both systems were shown to be easily hacked without
detection. http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm
The California report confirms what at least
two dozen Prior
studies from prestigious universities, the Government
Accountability Office, the Brennan Center and the federal government’s own
technical advisors, the National Institute of Standards and Technology have
concluded: the machines Americans are voting on are shockingly insecure and
seriously vulnerable to attacks that could change the outcome of
elections. While tampering has always
been a risk to every type of voting system, the threat created by computerized
systems is exponentially increased:
“Potentially, a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major
election” The National Institute of Standards and Technology, December
2006
The absurdity
of the federal government's position goes even further. The DOJ's memo of law
worries that someone might get away with something: "To view this scenario
otherwise would allow a state to ignore with impunity HAVA's minimal federal
voting systems requirements for however long it pleases." Hmm.
Is this anything comparable to the telephone companies violating the US
Constitution, the Bill of Rights and various state and local laws by spying on
US citizens for the federal government, with impunity?
If the
federal government is magnanimous enough to grant immunity to such gross
violations of liberty in the Land of the Free, certainly it can allow a State
to demand securable voting, despite HAVA's arbitrary deployment deadline.
"Why are
we being forced to buy machines that have been found incapable of accurately
providing a reliable vote tally, but have been found to
be readily capable of rigging the elections in a way that is not
detectable by the people?" asked Andrea Novick, a New York based
attorney, Co-Coordinator of Education with Election Defense Alliance and
Co-Founder of Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media. She continued,
"The California Secretary of State decertified these very machines because
they were unable to provide the means of conducting a secure, reliable
election. And yet the state of New York is only considering the purchase
of these rejected machines."
Now the DOJ
is trying to force NY to purchase these defective machines without even
permitting NY to perform testing certification of systems which are known to
fail. Novick said, "It's like forcing Americans to buy Ford Pintos even
after they were revealed to blow up upon impact in accidents. Why would
we knowingly purchase dangerous products.
The computerized voting systems on the market are so dangerous
they enable theft on a massive scale never before possible. These machines
should have been recalled, but instead the DOJ and NYS want us to use tax payers'
dollars to buy these flawed systems".
A recent Zogby poll documented a record
breaking polling statistic: 92% of Americans insist on the right to watch their
votes being counted. 80% strongly object to the use of secret computer software
to tabulate votes without citizen access to that software. And yet, all computerized voting systems on
the market count the votes in secret!
Under NY's laws, the partisan voting vendor and a few select members of
the government would see the source coding which provides some inkling into how
the computers were programmed to process and count the votes, but the citizens
are never permitted to know how their votes are counted. The DOJ objects to even a few members of
state government knowing how the machines are programmed to count the votes,
while defending Microsoft's right to keep vote counting secreted from the
people over the people's right to see and know that their votes are being
accurately counted.
The voting vendors
who sell these flawed systems which fail to produce fair, honest
elections, conceal the myriad of problems their systems
experience. In addition to covering up or failing to tell other states
about known software problems that caused the mis-tabulation of votes or other
computer problems in another state, the vendors have engaged in a wide range of
deceptive practices including documented cases of lying to election officials,
secret installation of unapproved software and a long list of ethical
violations. Many of these violations are documented at www.votersunite.org, Why Recall the Machines?,Voting System
Companies Fail to Meet New York State’s Requirements for “Responsible
Contractors”, More
Evidence of Vendor Unfitness, by Andi Novick, Esq., And More by Andi Novick, Esq.
New York's
Procurement Laws prohibit NYS from entering into contracts with
"non-responsible" vendors. New York's courts have upheld
findings of vendor non-responsibility for the very ethical violations these
vendors have committed as well as barring the state from doing business
with vendors with criminal indictments, criminal convictions, and of
course records of failed past performance. The voting vendors are
guilty of multiple infractions of all these criteria.
The three largest
vendors among this very small group of voting vendors are ES&S, Diebold and
Sequoia and among the founders, employees, programmers and managers of these
companies to which we are supposed to entrust our vote are felons who have been
convicted of bid-rigging, anti-trust violations, computer-aided embezzlement,
money laundering, tax evasion, bribery and kick-back scandals – to name a
few.
The voting vendors
have a long record of failed past performance which includes repeated instances
of failure to timely deliver machines or ballots- jeopardizing elections and
creating a nightmare for officials; forcing election officials to compromise
their ethics and integrity in running elections ("What I was expected to
do in order to 'pull off' an election," an election programmer in Texas
complained, "was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be
standard and accepted in the election industry"); holding election
officials hostage to contract re-negotiation (Oregon’s SOS sued when ES&S
refused to deliver machines pursuant to the contract unless the terms of the
contract were changed, saying: “We will not leave our elections in the hands of
companies that do not follow through on their obligations, and we will not be
coerced into altering our contract”); thousands of reports of documented
equipment failures including malfunctioning machines, election day breakdowns,
vote-switching on DREs, tabulation errors, paper jams, data transfer failures,
excessively high undervotes, phantom votes (in the 2004 election, Gahanna Ohio
recorded 4,258 votes for Bush when only 638 people cast votes at the polling
site).
The documented
evidence of the above criteria of non-responsibility was submitted to the SBOE
and other agencies within the Governor's office, but has been ignored to date.
Elections belong to the people.
They are our means of choosing those we want to represent us. The
Legislature, Executive and the Attorney General in NY as well as the federal
government all claim to be protecting our interests, but what part of our interests are protected when
the government permits secret vote counting? What part of our interests are protected when we
are forced to vote on machines that have been repeatedly demonstrated to be
easily rigged? What part of our interests are being served by machines which deprive
citizens of the right to observe the casting and counting of our votes and see
that the count is accurate?
Now the DOJ has insisted NY better put a HAVA-compliant
system in place by 2008 or else. NY insists it can't possibly certify
machines in time. The Feds have now shot back- that's OK, don't certify
them- just buy the machines which have been found to be defective and
unreliable. There is now only a single solution to the deadlock our
respective governments find themselves in. We can cast our votes by our
own hand and count them ourselves, without the interference of theft-enabling
computers. Those who need assistance
voting independently can use a ballot marker to produce a paper ballot to be
manually counted with all other paper ballots.
We don’t need to waste our millions performing expensive testing
certification. We don’t need to waste
money buying these lemons. We have a
year to prepare our citizens to count each others votes honestly, transparently
and reliably. How ironic that the only solution which is HAVA-compliant, can be
implemented in time for the 2008 election, and best protects our interests is the one rejected
out of hand by all those in government claiming to be looking out for our interests.