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The Post-Standard

How to vote is the next major issue ahead

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

BLAIR HORNER

ALBANY

Well, this is it, the big day is finally here. From Buffalo to Montauk, New Yorkers are trudging to the polls. Choosing our representatives is important, but how we choose them is also a critical issue. Without public trust in the means of selecting our representatives, the legitimacy of democracy is called into question.

This could be the year that voters bid farewell to the lever machines, vote-counting workhorses used for generations. After the Bush-Gore election debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which required states to buy modern voting machines. While the rest of the nation has done so, New York has lagged behind, being the last in the nation to act.

When government resists change, sometimes - just sometimes - it can work out in the public's best interest. In the case of HAVA, being last to act may mean that New York won't make some of the mistakes of other states.

Electronic voting machines are being offered as the solution to the HAVA requirement. However, there are concerns that some electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering and that their technology is prone to errors.

In Florida, voters reported that after selecting Democratic candidates on electronic voting machines, the machines registered that they had chosen Republicans.

In Virginia, some voting machines' summary pages will not include the last name of the U.S. Senate Democratic candidate.

In Maryland, September primary voters waited for hours to get to their touch-screen voting machines because workers forgot the access cards that activate them.

In Ohio, voters now use electronic voting machines with a "paper trail" backup. But in that state's primary, 10 percent of the back-up paper ballots jammed or were otherwise unreadable.

New York should take heed of these experiences. Yet New York officials are leaning toward purchasing electronic machines similar to those that have caused problems in other states. It doesn't have to be that way.

New York could choose machines that rely on optical scanning, which are simpler and easier to maintain. In jurisdictions that use optical scanning, voters fill in bubbles on paper ballots and then run the ballots through a scanner. The machines quickly tally the votes, and since the votes were marked on a paper ballot, they can be reviewed.

New York policymakers can learn from the problems caused by new voting technologies used across the nation. If so, New York voters will look back on the 2006 election as a step toward improving the democratic process. The alternative could be a costly mistake that undermines democracy.

Blair Horner is legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. To contribute to "Rethinking Albany," contact state editor Paul Riede at 470-2138 or e-mail him at priede@syracuse.com.

© 2006 The Post-Standard.