Teresa Hommel

www.wheresthepaper.org

Chairwoman, Task Force on Election Integrity, Community Church of NY

Press Conference, November 13, 2006

Computerized voting machines are not video games.

We need to see more than a touchscreen that lights up

when you touch a candidate’s name.

Electronic voting machines are being treated like video games. Let me explain:

• When you touch candidate's name on the touchscreen, and it lights up, that’s good, but it doesn't tell us whether the vote was recorded correctly inside computer memory.

• When you touch candidate's name, and the light doesn’t jump to a different candidate’s name -- like it has in so many other jurisdictions in our last several elections -- that's good too. But we still don’t know whether the vote is “jumping” to another candidate inside the computer.

Computers in professional use require constant auditing to make sure they are working correctly, but NO ONE in our Boards of Elections wants to do that. If the computers won’t be used according to professional standards, they should not be used. We should stick to low-tech paper ballots, which everyone understands. Optical scanners are simple and we’ve already been using them for years.

New York state law requires electronic voting machines to print a voter-verified paper audit trail, which puts New York ahead of many states. But just printing an audit trail does not tell us whether votes are being recorded correctly inside the computer. We need audits for that!

There has never been an audit of any computerized election. Never!

Our new state election law only requires a spot-check of 3% of electronic voting machines. 3% of our machines will be randomly selected, and the votes in the paper trails from those machines will be counted and compared to the electronic tallies. We have two problems here.

• Our state law does not require the paper count and the electronic count to match! When they don’t, candidates will have to find the money to go to court to get a broader count.

• 97% of our future electronic voting machines will handle votes entirely electronically. That means about 97% of our voters will never see their own votes or their own ballot, and no one will check those computers.

When we read reports of so-called glitches -- computer failures -- in elections in other jurisdictions, invariably the vendors or election directors say that the pollworkers were poorly trained. The press needs to ask more questions:

• Why aren’t machines that are supposed to be designed for pollworkers and voters actually usable by them?
• Why didn’t anyone run a full mock election test before buying the equipment, to find out if it was usable in real life by the real people who were going to use it?

We praise our New York City Board of Elections because they are holding two public demonstrations of the machines under consideration this week.

But we call upon our Board to do more. We call for the measures recommended by City Council Resolution 228-A which passed with bipartisan sponsorship and unanimous vote on August 16 this year:

1. Full mock election tests, so that our real elections next year are not the first full test of the machines.

• Show us that your staff can do the ballot definitions, and prepare the machines for use.
• Show us average, ordinary pollworkers turning them on, showing voters how to vote and verify the paper trail, and extracting tallies at the end of the mock election.
• Show us those paper trails.
• Show us the system logs.

2. We want to know that our Board has some way for themselves, candidates and parties to confirm that

· the equipment we buy and get delivered to us, is the same as the equipment certified by our state, and

· the equipment does not contain illegal components, such as wireless communications.

Our elections staff, poll workers and voters are not all computer scientists. We should not invest city tax-payers’ money in machines that will baffle and confuse our people, and that no one wants to evaluate and test in a professional manner.

I urge the press to watch out for, and criticize, the video-game approach to electronic voting machines.

Money is another issue. Paper ballots and optical scanners are affordable, even if the federal government takes back some of the money they gave us for new equipment. Electronic voting machines will drain money away from other needs.

Recently Mayor Bloomberg said we should sell the firehouses we closed, rather than reopening them, because “the city needs the money.” We should not squander millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions, on electronic voting equipment that will last a short time, probably not work, and reduce public confidence and respect for our elections.

The Task Force on Election Integrity has just published a major cost study of new equipment under consideration. We urge the press to carefully look at these costs, and inform the public about the huge cost savings of paper ballot and optical scanner systems.

Thank you.