The Fight to Hold on to Our HAVA-Compliant Lever Voting System: Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

[Wilms]

The Fight to Hold on to Our HAVA-Compliant Lever Voting System: Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

By Andi Novick and Rady Ananda

July 28, 2008

"If citizens mistakenly believe that a court has already ruled against the legality of our lever voting system, they will give up and accept the unconstitutional system planned for 2009."

Let's Clear the Air distinguishes the facts from the myths about the status of New York State's electoral system. New York is the only state not to have computerized its electoral system and the only state that still has a secure, reliable, transparent, functioning electoral system. Since New York is in the process of installing ballot marking devices in every poll site, providing an accessible means for voters with special needs to vote independently, there is no justification for the State to abandon its now HAVA-compliant lever voting system.

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What happens next in New York will reverberate around the nation. It is therefore critical that we keep these facts straight.

In 2005, New York's Legislature passed the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), determining that it would comply with HAVA by replacing our lever voting system with a computerized voting system. Subsequently, it consented to an Order in federal court, implementing a timeline to replace our levers with computerized "crap" by 2009.

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We are the last state with a democratically-compliant, transparent, trustworthy, non-computerized, non-privatized electoral system. We are entitled to our day in court before we surrender our safeguarded electoral system to one that opens the door to known and new opportunities to fraud. We must fight to preserve our lever voting system now before it is replaced.

This is why we believe it is so important to keep the facts straight and accurate in the public's mind.

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--We believe a democratic electoral system requires that ordinary people be able to observe that the system accurately counts our votes.

--We believe it requires that many eyes be able to check each other as we witness the process that results in the count.

--We believe it requires the production of reliable, publicly accessible evidence of both how the votes were counted as well as evidence of tampering, should it occur.

--We believe a democratic electoral system must be designed to detect, deter and reveal fraud, without which there is no deterrent to committing fraud.

--We believe a democratic electoral system must contain safeguards that prevent every known opportunity for tampering.

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New York's new law, ERMA, permits software-driven optical scanners or DREs to count our votes. Computer security scholars and professionals corroborate that software can be undetectably altered before, during and after Election Day, despite the most rigorous certification testing anyone might provide. ERMA, therefore, fails to ensure that the election night count is reliable. All we can do to attempt to verify the uncertain computerized count is manually count the paper ballots, but ERMA requires that the "audit" be done after the election is over after the results from all other precincts are known, after the press has announced the winner, and after ongoing public scrutiny of the ballots has ended.

The entire history of New York's Election Law, until ERMA, recognized that post-election ballot tampering is so probable that it has never permitted post-election verification of the secure, reliable, publicly observed first count. Under ERMA, not only is the first count (by software) undependable and concealed from the pubic, but the post-election "audit" is also unreliable, since the ballots being hand counted to verify the first count no longer enjoy the security of uninterrupted public scrutiny enabled by the many authorized watchers at the poll site. Under ERMA, the integrity of the verification is impugned, leaving the entire count unknowable and unreliable.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Fight-to-Hold-on-to-Ou-by-andi-novick-080728-948.html

Petition To Save New York's Lever Voting System

[OneBlueSky]

1. I've been voting on lever machines all my life . . .

and when this flap about electronic voting first erupted, I asked myself "what's wrong with the lever machines?" . . . I never followed up on my question to myself, assuming I guess that the powers that be had found these machines somehow lacking . . . not so, apparently . . .

the question that always has to be asked in the rush to "modernize" the world is "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" . . . in the case of lever voting machines, it certainly ain't broke, and there's absolutely no reason to "fix" it . . .

except to produce billions in profits for the electronic voting machine manufacturers and to provide a convenient way to fix elections, that is . . .

[eridani]

5. They can't be audited--that's what's wrong with them

They should not be replaced with worse alternatives, however.

[Wilms]

6. That individual votes can't be audited considered a plus by some.

It was a design goal of the machine. Ya know, ballot tampering, Chain-O'-Custody, etc.

[eridani]

7. Also, not a clue about whether anyone's vote was skipped

Gears wear with use, you know.

[Wilms]

8. There is inspection and repair.

Did I mention that levers are absolutely perfect?

I was wrong.

[eridani]

9. Inspection tells you nothing whatsoever about whether there was any vote skipping

--or how many votes were skipped if so. It's roughly equivalent to the inadequate "logic and accuracy" testing.

[Wilms]

10. How many...sure. But IF it was skipping?

I know why L&A test are of limited value on a OpScan or DRE. But why aren't they valid in the case of a lever machine?

[eridani]

11. When I test for polyaromatic hydrocarbons--

--just running one standard curve is not enough. I have to run check standards every ten samples as well.

[cascadiance]

2. I spoke to Doug Jones (Univ. of Iowa voting expert) a while back, and lever systems have problems...

Doug Jones was the consultant used for the HBO film "Hacking Democracy" and is sought for many issues. I got to talk to him when visiting back in Iowa a couple of years ago before the 2006 election. Pretty interesting guy...

He talked about stories of even back in the days of lever voting systems that there was a history of people who were trained to distinguish the sound of "yes" and "no" lever pulls, that stood behind the voting booths, and therefore they could tell when people voted against what the company bosses wanted them to, etc. and there was cases of voter retaliation and intimidation in those days too. I'm guessing they don't train those kind of people any more with these things disappearing from the radar screen, but it might be even simpler these days to electronically synthesize these sounds and do the same things.

He also voiced a lot of concern over the mandated vote by mail setups that places like Oregon have now, in that he feels a lot more needs to be regulated on how these votes coming in through the mail get entered into the system, and that there could be fraud there as well, without proper oversight.

[Wilms]

3. Ya know, I thought that guy leaning against the machine reading a paper looked a bit out of place.

Sounds like a good law would be that no one can stand near a lever machine when a voter is using it.

Doug is right to remind that NO system is foolproof. I have to wonder, too, how big a stretch it was to pull that bit from a bag.

[kster]

4. I'm all for vote by mail, but I have my own ideas... nt