Lever Machines Don’t Have To Be Replaced According to The EAC

[Amaryllis]

Lever Machines Don’t Have To Be Replaced According to The EAC
by John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA
28 August 2005

Since the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was signed into law by the President, statements have been made by Secretaries of State, state elections officials, national organizations, and voting machine vendors all saying the same thing: “HAVA mandates that all lever and punch-card voting machines must be replaced by modern electronic voting systems.”

Many voting activists have pointed out that HAVA does not make those mandates. In fact, HAVA clearly gives allowances to those states or counties who want to keep their older voting systems. In the case of punch-card systems, counties only need to provide a means for disabled voters to vote in privacy, forego Title One funds, and begin a voter education program to cut down on the number of over votes that might occur. The states ignored the evidence in the HAVA text itself, as well as the voices of the voting activists.

Now, three years after HAVA was signed into law and after many states have already made their decisions and replaced their punch-cards or lever machines, the Elections Assistance Commission has made a statement showing that the voting activists were correct all the time. Lever machines do not have to be replaced. Punch-cards do not have to be replaced.

Read the rest of the article here.
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=122&Itemid=51

[Bill Bored]

1. Of course they don't!

You just have to replace every DRE that doesn't conform to 2002 error rate specs, that's all!

[Amaryllis]

2. The MS SOS told the county electioin officials they had to replace

all thier punch cards. The Voters Unite people are ALWAYS getting called to straighten out this kind of misinformation that is promoted by election officials and and SOS's. One has to ask if they are ignorant or complicit! On the take?

[Bill Bored]

4. Not crazy about punch cards, but you can keep them as long as you

have a voter education program to prevent overvotes, hanging chads, etc.
And I'd take them over paperless DREs any day.

Ohio has other issues with punch cards though: Ballot order rotation, no precinct identifiers on the ballots, etc. That stuff is legal under HAVA!

[Land Shark]

3. Here's the PA newspaper link provided by votersunite today

where federal officials belatedly admit levers need not be replaced.

<http://www.heraldstandard.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15111076&BRD=2280&PAG=461&dept_id=480247&rfi=6>

Now after all the misstatements that have occurred, they can claim they didn't "go around telling people" levers had to be replaced prior to the 1/1/06 deadline.

[Bill Bored]

5. Lever Machine Auditing

Glad to see this from the EAC, but there's still some misunderstanding about paper audit records for lever machines.

HAVA says the voting "system" must have a paper audit capacity -- not the voting "machine." HAVA also defines the term "system" to be everything from soup to nuts.

All the system has to do to create a paper audit trail for lever machines is for the poll workers to write down the results from the counters on a piece of paper!

Of course, these are checked and double checked by both parties, etc. and they're preserved for recounts, along with the machines themselves. But the point is, you don't need to install printers on mechanical lever machines for them to be HAVA-compliant as long as you write down the results on paper.

Please spread this around because it's the next bit of HAVA debunking that needs to come out. The articles cited in this thread demonstrate that there are still state election officials who haven't read the law.

[tommcintyre]

6. But, Jim Baker said old machines baaad, new machines gooood!

in the Documentary, "Invisible Ballots". And HE was made co-chair of the election reform committee. So, we should trust him, right?:sarcasm:

Orwell must be rolling in his grave.