Teresa Hommel
www.wheresthepaper.org
Thank you
for the opportunity to speak before you today. My name is Teresa Hommel. I am
Chairwoman of the Task Force on Election Integrity of Community Church of New
York.
I would like
to make four points, and attached to my testimony is documentation for them.
1. Cost of
new voting systems
The Help
America Vote Act became law more than three years ago, and New York’s Election
Reform and Modernization Act became law more than five months ago.
Nevertheless,
no governmental body has yet produced an unbiased assessment of the cost of
replacement of our lever voting machines. The public is not informed about the
cost implications of the choices we have before us, electronic voting (“DREs”)
versus paper ballots and optical scanners with accessible ballot-marking
devices for voters with special needs (“PBOS”).
Please turn
to Attachments 1 and 2 in the first paper clip. This sorry pair of documents is
what we have seen in New York state: a 20-page assessment of costs by the
Election Commissioners’ Association of the State of New York[1], dated June
2005, followed by 8 pages of corrections of bias errors from New Yorkers for
Verified Voting[2].
Please turn
to Attachment 3. This is the North Carolina Legislative Fiscal Note for Bill
233 that was passed into law in August[3]. On the first page they report their
calculation of costs. Alternative 1, All O/S (Optical Scanners): $45.96
million. Alternative 2, All DRE: $135.13 million. The note describes their
assumptions and methodology.
Next, please
turn to Attachments 4, 5, and 6 in the second paper clip[4].
Attachment 4
is a summary of the cost of purchase of new equipment for the five boroughs of
New York City. The boldface numbers for each paragraph show the purchase cost.
At the bottom, you see how many units of programmable equipment are needed,
which bears on many costs of transition and many continuing costs.
Attachment 5
is a sample of the data I obtained from the New York City Board of Elections,
from which I abstracted the list of poll sites and how many levers were used in
each poll site. With this information it was a matter of simple arithmetic to calculate
the cost of replacement.
Attachment 6
is all 25 reports that I have prepared so far. The numbers summarized on
Attachment 4 were copied from these reports.
To summarize the cost information:
--Purchase cost for DREs is 2 to 3 times more than for PBOS equipment.
--Many transition and continuing costs of DREs would be 1.5 to 1.8 times more, because many
more units of DRE equipment would be needed.
Finally, DREs have a shorter useful lifetime than PBOS equipment, so that if we spend our one-time federal dollars for DREs, we'll be spending money again soon. But next time, it will be the taxpayers' money.
Electronic elections won't be paperless, so we can't save much money there -- paper ballots will be needed for absentee and provisional voters. Like lever voting machines, DREs need paper emergency ballots as backup in case the machine breaks down. In jurisdictions where paper ballot backup was not available, when DREs malfunctioned voters have ended up scribbling the names of their candidates on slips of paper torn off their grocery bags.
The lack of
an official and unbiased assessment of costs suggests that something is wrong
in our state. I urge the Assembly Election Committee to act aggressively to set
it right.
2.
Unfinished business
Please go
back to Attachment 3, the North Carolina Legislative Fiscal Note, and look at
pages 2 and 3.
--This law
requires vendors to post a bond or letter of credit to cover damages from
defects in
voting systems, including the cost of a new
election
--It
requires source code to be submitted for review by the county, the State Board
of Elections,
the NC Office of Information Technology,
AND the Chair of any legally recognized political
party.
--It creates
two new felonies for voting system vendors.
North
Carolina has used electronic voting systems for several years, and this law is
the result of their experience.
New York is
one of the last states to venture away from our tried-and-true older
technology, but we have not looked carefully at the experience of other states
as a guide to where the pitfalls are.
I urge you
to finish the work of election reform and modernization. If the law of New York
allows the use of computerized voting systems, the law must be updated (1) to
reflect professional standards for computer security and (2) to safeguard
transparency of elections.
I urge the Assembly Election Committee to work with citizen
activists such as New Yorkers for Verified Voting, and others who are
knowledgeable about computerized voting systems and their problems, to write
laws appropriate for computerized voting, rather than, as our law does now,
apply concepts appropriate for paper ballots and mechanical lever machines to
computers.
The term
“transparency” is not well-defined in regard to elections, so I want to make
clear what I mean.
A citizen without technical knowledge of computers or mathematics
should be able to appropriately and effectively observe election procedures and
vote counting.
--Voters should not have to trust a “computer expert” to tell them
that their vote was cast.
--Voters should not have to trust a “statistical expert” who tells
them that a spot-check of
3% of the computerized
voting systems in a county means that 100% of the computers
worked because 3% is
“significant.”
We need a
law to correct our State Board of Election’s notion that an electronic voting
system can be adequately tested by running an automated “test” that does not
make use of all of the hardware or programming that voters and poll workers
will use on election day[5]. Attachment 7 provides more information on this
subject.
Automated
tests mean that voters and poll workers will discover errors on election day
that should have been detected and corrected in advance. Automated testing may
be the reason that voters in other jurisdictions have pressed one candidate’s
name and another candidate’s name lights up, or when the voter scrolls back to
check their votes they discover their choices have been switched, or poll
workers cannot extract the tallies at the end of the day, etc.
We need a
law to ban all communication capability in electronic voting and vote
tabulating equipment, and a requirement that all candidates and parties may
examine the equipment before and after each election to confirm that no
communication-related hardware or programming is present in the system, with
criminal penalties and fines for violations.
We need a
law to require each system certified by this state to pass a large public test
such as performed on equipment in California[6], and a “Red Team” hacker test
such as commissioned by the Maryland General Assembly and performed by RABA
Technologies, LLC [7].
3. Learning from the experience of other states
If we know
experience of other states, we may be able to avoid making the same mistakes.
I urge that
every member of the Assembly Elections Committee subscribe to two voting news
services via email. Thirty seconds a day to scan the headlines is not unduly burdensome,
and the firsthand knowledge to be gained by that small investment cannot be
obtained any other way. This is what you will read about:
--Irregularities
in other states’ certification of electronic voting equipment
--Irregularities
in other states’ conduct of elections with electronic equipment
--Privatization
of electronic elections in other states, and the repercussions
--Citizens
shut out of observing procedures which need to be observed for the legitimacy
of
elections and our representative government
Daily Voting
News from
VotersUnite.org. Send an email to DVN@votersunite.org
Election
Integrity News from
VoteTrustUSA.org. Weekly. Send an email to contact@votetrustusa.org
In addition,
it will be useful to check, on a daily or weekly basis, the web site of New
Yorkers for Verified Voting for news and alerts. I understand that the
legislative spam blocker prevents them from sending their news to you directly.
The web site is www.nyvv.org
4. The draft regulations for voting system certification
are poor.
The draft
regulations published by our State Board of Elections are unreadably poor. The
requirements for certification of electronic voting systems are so superficial
as to be meaningless. Attachments 8 and 9 are analyses of the draft regulations[8],
and demonstrate the need for greater legal control of elections, and less
delegation to a body that is immune to public input.
Thank you.
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1. http://www.nyvv.org/reports/ECASystemsReviewV1.pdf
2. http://www.nyvv.org/reports/ECAvsrCrit.pdf
3. http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Sessions/2005/FiscalNotes/Senate/PDF/SFN0223v5n1.pdf
4. http://www.wheresthepaper.org/NYCcost.html
5. http://www.wheresthepaper.org/NoAutomatedTests.htm
6. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/073005F.shtml
http://votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95&Itemid=50
7. http://www.raba.com/press/TA_Report_AccuVote.pdf