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The Journal News.

Caution urged on new voting machines

By Albany Bureau

(Original Publication: November 16, 2006)

Dan Wiessner

ALBANY - Calling hundreds of voting mishaps across the country on Election Day a "disaster," voting experts yesterday stressed the need for New York to be cautious in deciding what new voting machines to buy.

Most of the errors, some of which involved enough votes to potentially swing elections, were caused by the failures of electronic touch-screen voting machines, said Aimee Allaud, a voting expert with the League of Women Voters.

The errors included recording votes for the wrong candidate, recording more votes than there were registered voters and double-counting some ballots.

"Over 200 machine-malfunction problems of different types for this past election have been documented," she said. "Election officials in New York should take advantage of the experience of other states when considering their choice for replacing lever voting machines."

Allaud was referring to the repeatedly postponed decision that the state Board of Elections must make regarding the certification of new voting machines.

The elections board has decided to scrap lever machines because they are difficult for handicapped people to use.

But the board was unable to decide whether to mandate the use of ATM-style touch-screen machines or optical-scanning devices that read and count ballots marked with pencils, instead leaving that decision up to counties. The League of Women Voters and a watchdog group called New Yorkers for Verified Voting favor the optical scanners.

"When a touch-screen voting machine fails, the original record of the vote is permanently lost," said Bo Lipari of New Yorkers for Verified Voting. "But if a problem occurs on a ballot-scanner system, the hand-marked paper ballots make it possible to conduct recounts and obtain results that voters have confidence in."

The elections board is now trying to decide which brands of machines the counties can use.

"We have a responsibility to test both kinds of machines," said board spokesman Robert Brehm. "We can't pursue one option over the other."

But he added, "We do have the benefit of being able to look at what other states have done and learning from their mistakes."

The 2002 Help America Vote Act, a federal mandate designed to remedy voting problems brought to light during the 2000 presidential election, required that all states implement new voting technology in time for the 2006 primary elections. New York was the only state to miss the deadline, resulting in a loss of $50 million in federal funding, Lipari said.

The latest postponement came two weeks ago, when the board decided that it could not meet a mid-December deadline because of security issues with machines that were being tested. No new deadline was set, though Allaud and Lipari said that it would likely be late February or early March before a decision was made.

Another delay will make it impossible for counties to implement new machines in time for the 2007 elections, Lipari said. This would mean that the next opportunity to use new machines would be the 2008 presidential election, which he said would not be feasible because of potential problems caused by big voter turnouts for those elections.

But Brehm said the board is still confident that new machines will be in place for the 2007 voting.

Russ Haven of the New York State Public Interest Research Group, which endorses optical-scan systems, said that it is crucial to instill confidence in young voters, which could be hurt by the use of touch-screen machines.

"It is important that students develop the voting habit," he said. "We're concerned that if technology is seen as unreliable, students will stay away from the polls."

Voting technology is not the only area that needs reform, according to Allaud.

"Voting machines are only one part of" the issue, she said. "We need better poll worker recruitment and education as well as voter education."