Teresa Hommel
www.wheresthepaper.org
Committee
on Governmental Operations, New York City Council
September 26, 2008
New
York State law now bans the continued use of our mechanical lever voting
machines. It is time for the New York City Council and the Board of Elections
in the City of New York to advocate that our state legislature rescind the ban,
and allow continued use of our old equipment.
1.
Federal law allows continued use of lever machines. HAVA (the Help America Vote
Act of 2002) requires one accessible voting device per poll site, which New
York has now complied with. The belief that HAVA bans lever machines has been
promoted by those who stand to make a lot of money from the sale of
computerized replacements. However, a person merely needs to read HAVA to
discover that there is no ban on lever machines.[1] There is no requirement for
using computerized voting equipment. For example, attached to my testimony is
an article from September 24, 2008, with photos, describing eight counties in
Idaho that are still using punch card voting. We don’t see the U.S. Department
of Justice suing them to make them start using computerized equipment.
2.
New York State is the first state in the nation to competently test the new
computerized equipment prior to state certification, purchase and use. The
equipment is still failing its tests. I understand that the federal court is now pressuring
our State Board of Elections to hurry up and certify the equipment anyway. This
should be a tip-off that something is wrong and we should NOT hurry up.
3.
Arguments against continued use of lever machines are false or
irrelevant.
a. FALSE: No parts are available. Most parts in a lever
machine are standard parts you can buy in a hardware store. The few parts that
are not standard can be made in a machine shop.
b. FALSE: Everyone should vote on the same
equipment. Federal
law does not require everyone to use the same equipment. However, if too
few people use the accessible BMDs, that could compromise the secrecy of the
ballots cast by those who use them. We have been told for years that as many as
20% of voters have some form of disability that could limit their ability to
cast a private and independent vote, and that these voters wish to vote at
their local poll site where the majority of voters vote. If these voters use
our BMDs that should solve the problem. We can also require our poll workers to
encourage all voters to use the BMDs if they are not busy.
c. IRRELEVANT: The lever machines are old. This is
the computer age. The important thing is to use the best tool for the job. Lever
machines are one of the most reliable inventions of the last century, the
easiest and least expensive voting machines to repair and maintain, the hardest
to tamper with, and the most understandable to poll workers and voters.
Computers are the least reliable, hardest to repair (which is why people just
get a new one when they have trouble), the easiest voting equipment to tamper
with, and the least understandable to everyone.
d. IRRELEVANT: New York would have to return the
HAVA money we have received. This is a political issue, because “returning
federal money” might “look bad” and would have to be explained to people who
have not followed this issue.
But returning the money would be prudent, because
the amount we received will never cover the cost of maintaining the new
equipment, nor the cost of replacing it when it falls apart after our
state-required 5-year warrantees run out. Given the current economic crisis in
our country, we should not replace our cost-effective lever machines to get new
equipment that we will not have the money to maintain and replace.
In addition, the secure use of computerized voting
systems requires post-election audits. Our Boards of Elections are already
working with insufficient funds, and the need for audits will require more
personnel and effort than we currently need to recanvass the lever machines.
1.
When touchscreen voting machines, called “DREs” were first introduced, the
design of the machines allowed no way to confirm that they were functioning
correctly.
Jim Dickson, Vice President of the American Association of People with
Disabilities, was the leading disability advocate for paperless electronic
voting from 2001 until recently. When I asked in a public forum in June, 2003,
how anyone would know if the machines were working or not, he stated, “I trust the
computer.” All over our country election administrators were saying, “We trust
the computer.” It was a talking-point.
But
it was the wrong answer. The FBI computer crime survey of 2005 showed that 87%
of computer installations had had “security incidents” in that one year alone.
64% of incidents resulted in the loss of money, which meant the incident was
serious, not trivial. 44% of incidents resulted from insiders. There is no
reason to expect our Boards of Elections to have a different set of statistics
from the American average.
Touchscreen
voting machines have been commonly compared to ATMs, but a google search for
“ATM fraud” results in hundreds of thousands of listings.
Computer
industry surveys have showed that 72% of computer projects never worked, but
those were projects where the functioning of the systems was rigorously
audited. Since touchscreens did not allow anyone to determine whether they were
working or not, the likelihood of them working was zero.
2.
“DREs with a voter-verified paper trail” was considered a solution to allow use
of computers for voting, but to verify that they were working correctly. When I became an activist
against electronic voting in June, 2003, I advocated the use of a paper trail
so that the proper and accurate functioning of the DREs could be confirmed. But
DREs with a paper trail is now recognized as a failed idea for three reasons.
a. Most voters lack the skill to be able to verify a
paper trail.
b. Election administrators nationwide said that they
lacked the will, mandate, funds, skills, personnel, and time after elections to
perform computer audits to verify that their DREs with a paper trail had worked properly and
accurately during elections.
c. Vendors have provided printers that are so shoddy that in jurisdictions where
DREs are required to have paper-trail printers, the paper trail can not be used
to verify the work of the DRE.
3.
Optical scanners have a much higher success rate than DREs. For 3 years I advocated the
use of voter-marked paper ballots and optical scanners. This Committee and the
City Council know the many advantages of optical scanners over DREs. The fact
that voters directly mark their paper ballot means that we have an authentic
and accurate record of the voters’ intent. Yet in the last year, we have seen
problems with the use of optical scanners. They are computers and subject to
the same problems as all computers. Boards of Elections have to do an audit to
prove that the scanner worked properly and that the ballot programming was correct,
but most Boards of Elections don’t want to do an audit. You need citizen
observers to watch the entire chain of custody of the paper ballots to prevent
tampering, but most Boards of Elections don’t want to allow observation of the
chain of custody.
There
is a long history of fraud and tampering with paper ballots, which is a good
thing. It shows that problems with paper ballots are detectable and preventable, unlike problems with
invisible electronic ballots inside DREs. All we would need is continuous
citizen observation of the entire chain of custody of the paper ballots, and
the use of modern technology in the form of surveillance cameras and so on.
4.
Computers should not be used in elections—keep the levers!
Given the vast superiority of optical scanners over DREs,
and the many advantages of optical scanner voting systems, why am I now
advocating keeping our mechanical lever voting machines, and asking you and the
Board of Elections to do the same?
Optical
scanners, as computers, are subject to the same ease of undetectable tampering
as DREs. Computers are impossible to secure. The secure use of optical scanners
depends on proper auditing after the election. Activists across our
nation are working to devise auditing methods that will be the most accurate
and least burdensome. But we are talking about elections here, and conducting
elections is a lot of work. Auditing computers is one more task, and one more
expense for our underfunded Board of Elections, even when the audit is
relatively simple as it would be with voter-marked paper ballots and optical
scanner systems.
City
Council Resolution 228A of 2006 laid out requirements for public confidence in
the use of computerized voting systems, and those requirements are a
dirty secret. No one mentions them, especially our Board of Elections which
opposed passage of the resolution. We know that there is no way our Board of
Elections or candidates or the public can inspect computerized voting equipment
and confirm that it consists of only legal components and that the ballot
programming is correct. We can easily do this with lever machines. But
computers are too complex, too hard to understand, and the insides are
“proprietary secrets.”
Problems
with optical scan systems that we are seeing across the nation are:
a.
Failure to allow citizens to observe the chain of custody
of voted ballots
b.
Arrest of observers
c.
Failure to perform audits at all.
d.
Clueless election administrators who have no idea how their
equipment works, and vendor technicians who say they don’t understand what went
wrong, and public relations efforts that blame voters and poll workers for
machine failures.
e.
Dependence on vendors to “fix” any problems (privatization
of elections).
f.
“Lost” ballots and “lost” memory cartridges that are
mysteriously found again while no one is watching.
New
York should learn from the experience of other jurisdictions, and defend our
use of the lever machines . Lever machines are:
a.
More reliable
b.
Completely understandable with a week of training
c.
Easy-to-manage
d.
Inexpensive
e.
Difficult and time-consuming to tamper with (“retail
fraud”), so that they prevent the kind of “wholesale” fraud in which an entire
county-wide or state-wide contest can be corrupted in seconds
Election commissioners whisper that they would prefer to
keep the lever machines. Public officials say in private that they would prefer
to keep the lever machines. We know that New York State will end up in court
again if we try to keep the lever machines, because our federal government is
intent on privatizing American elections.
But it is time we stood up and defended our current system
because it works better than any computerized system ever can.
Thank you.
----------------
1. Some HAVA sections that refute the assertion that HAVA
bans lever voting machines. (http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt)
- Section 102(a)(3) says "a State receiving a payment
under the program under this section shall ensure that all of the punch card
voting systems or lever voting systems in the qualifying precincts within that
State have been replaced in time for the regularly scheduled general election
for Federal office to be held in November 2004." (Followed by the 2006
waiver paragraph). It DOES NOT say all states that have them must replace them,
only those receiving payments.
- Section 102(d) provides for repayment of the funds if the
punch card system or lever isn't replaced by the deadline. No other penalty.
- Section 101(b)(1)(H) - for example - provides funding (in
the same language as 102 provides funding for lever replacement) for
establishing a toll-free hotline that voters may use to report possible voting
fraud and voting rights violations. But nobody EVER refers to this as a
requirement.
- But more clear yet is Section 301(a)(1)(A) - the
requirements section says that
"the voting system (including any lever voting system, optical scan, or
DRE) shall ....." If levers were
banned after 2006, why would the requirements section specifically say that the
requirements in effect as of 2006 applied to lever machines?