http://www.insidealbany.com/Story_Details.php?ST_ID=293&showID=646
Inside Albany
Reporting on New York State government and politics since
1975 every week on public television
This Week on Inside Albany:
Program #0646 ~ November 17, 2006
Ballot glitches nationwide renews call for New York to
adopt a paper ballot, not an electronic, voting system.
Voting process reformers gathered Wednesday to talk about
what happened on election day with electronic voting across the United States.
Many states used touch screen electronic voting unlike New
York which has lagged the country in implementing the federal Help America Vote
Act or HAVA. It has yet to replace its 20,000 old lever voting machines. The US
Justice Department sued the state for failing to meet the HAVA deadline.
Russ Haven of the NYPIRG said: "This is one of those
rare and maybe only instance where dysfunction may have a public benefit."
Haven announced that NYPIRG is joining the League of Women
Voters and New Yorkers for Verified Voting to urge NYC and the 57 counties to
adopt a paper ballot voting system counted with an optical scanner. The groups
urge rejection of the DRE or direct recording electronic devices as unreliable
and insecure. The Legislature ceded that the decision from the state to the
local election boards.
Aimee Allaud, the League's voting expert, said reports of
glitches with electronic systems had been understated in media reports. She
said if she lived in one of the more than 200 jurisdictions where problems
occurred and her vote was lost, she would have regarded that as a
"disaster not a glitch."
Bo Lipari of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, cited reports
from thousands of citizen advocates of optical scanners that monitored
electronic voting equipment performance. The "most egregious"
example, he said was in a Sarasota, Florida congressional race where 18,000
votes seem to have been lost. He called them "undervotes."
It's been widely reported that the votes were not recorded
for either congressional candidate at a level way out of line with absentee
ballots and other races on the Sarasota ballot.
Doing a recount won't change the results, Lipari said, since
Florida's system has no paper trail to back up the electronic votes. He said
the big advantage of an optical scanning system is that there is always a paper
ballot to check the voter's original intent.
NY's Legislature instructed the State Board of Elections to
certify only machines, electronic or paper-based, that built in a voter
verified paper audit trail or VPAT.
Lipari said he didn't think that would lessen the
possibility of future horror stories about lost votes in NY. He cited numerous
reports of paper jams and VPATs running out of ink on election day. Aimee
Allaud added that the VPAT technology was "in its infancy." She said
it was grafted on to the touch screen devices and "voters don' know how to
use it."
Mayor Bloomberg complained about delays by the Legislature
in adopting a law and by the State Board of Elections not certifying new machines
yet. The board pushed back from December to early March the date when NYC and
the county boards get to pick new machines.
Aimee Allaud said several elections commissioners fear that
will mean a September primary election meltdown. The new schedule could leave
local boards only six months from March to the September to buy machines, do
training and actually use the new equipment.
The state board said NY will take the time to do it right.
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