Governor of New
York
Executive Chamber
Albany NY 12224
Re
New York State needs your leadership to get voter-marked paper ballots and
optical scanners
Dear Governor
Spitzer:
I urge you to
work actively and use the power of your office to help New York State switch to
a statewide system of voter-marked paper ballots and precinct-based optical
scanners when we have to replace our mechanical voting machines.
International
standards for election legitimacy are based on observation. But with electronic
voting machines, called DREs, voters and observers cannot see the ballots
inside the computer. The paper trail doesn’t count for initial tallies, and is
only spot-checked. With DREs, 97% of the tallies will be based on invisible
electronic ballots which voters can never verify, and observers can never
observe.
Elections
should be as simple and low-tech as possible. With paper ballots, we can easily confirm
tallies by recounting the first-hand voter-marked paper ballots. If we have the
political will for honest, accessible elections, we can have it with PBOS.
DREs are
capable of "ethnic profiling." When a voter selects a non-English
language for the screen display, these ballots have been found to be handled
differently from ballots cast in English. Palm Beach County, Florida, conducted a
parallel test in November, 2006, and found that the ballots cast using a
Spanish language display had missing votes. This is only one of many warnings
we have had about this problem. We should not use equipment where the machine
knows the voter’s language and can handle the votes differently based on the
voter’s language.
Please lead
our state to the use of low-tech, securable, understandable, and observable
voter-marked paper ballots and optical scanners!
Sincerely yours,
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