http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vplev085203733may08,0,298889.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines
Newsday.com
Keep old lever voting machines for now, until new
technology is perfected
May 8, 2007
Last week, a judge in Albany rejected a quixotic effort by
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy to fend off the trade of lever voting
machines for a technology to be named later. But other events have rendered the
legal defeat mostly moot: We are certain to be voting on lever machines this
year and almost certainly will be again next year.
In fact, we should all be rooting for the antiquated but
mostly reliable lever machines to be what's recording our votes in next
February's presidential primary and in the November general election. There's
just too much unsettling news about the electronic voting machines that would
replace the levers.
Take Florida. Its punch card system threw the 2000
presidential election into chaos, starting the momentum toward new voting
machines. Last November, 18,000 votes mysteriously did not register in the 13th
congressional district election there. That cast a cloud of suspicion over the
new touch-screen voting machines that produced the unexplained result. Now,
Florida's legislature has voted to scrap touch-screen technology and move to
paper ballots counted by optical scanners.
In New York, the situation has been messy, too. Our State
Legislature took forever to adopt a law implementing the Help America Vote Act
of 2002. The Justice Department sued. The result was a settlement that provided
a temporary solution: a limited number of ballot-marking devices to help
handicapped voters in last year's primary. We'll see something like that again
this year. But the vast majority of voters will use lever machines, despite the
federal deadline.
The big problem has been the snail's pace of the state Board
of Elections as it tries to certify a list of machines from which counties can
choose. After the federal Election Assistance Commission declined to accredit
the testing firm the state had hired, New York has to find a new firm. As a
result, it will be months before the state certifies machines. Then the
counties will have to make their choice of approved devices, buy them, receive
shipment, test them and train poll workers.
So new machines by February are out of the question. And it
would be madness to make counties put new machines into service for the first
time in a presidential general election. So, although Levy's lawsuit failed, his
hesitations about the new technology are amply warranted.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.