New York State has been proudly dragging its feet and is the only state to be out of compliance with the misleadingly named federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) since 2006 – incurring the wrath of the U.S. Justice Department, which filed a lawsuit against the state in March of that year threatening to take over the process, including the selection of which type of voting machine to use. The state has missed a passel of deadlines and is about to miss yet another one: the federal requirement that New York replace its lever machines with new HAVA-certified machines by Tuesday’s Feb. 5 presidential primary. Pull lever machines don’t meet HAVA requirements because they aren’t accessible to the disabled, and they don’t create a permanent paper record or allow the voter to “audit” his or her vote to ensure its accuracy.
As it turns out, though, the problems other states have had due to launching headlong into the adoption of suspect Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in order to implement HAVA have made our state’s oft-derided delay tactics look positively Solomonic. DREs have been shown to be fantastically unreliable, eminently hackable and a potential tool for would-be election fixers as an alternative to disenfranchising poor black Floridian Democrats. A growing number of electronic voting opponents – including a fair cross-section of legislators in Dutchess and Ulster counties – say the DRE voting machines constitute an unwelcome “middleman” between the able-bodied voter and his or her ballot.
None other than the venerable League of Women Voters has weighed in against DREs as well, concluding that “a precinct-based paper ballot with an optical scanner system should be adopted uniformly in New York,” wrote the organization’s Mid-Hudson region chapter president Jean McGarry last week. “The evidence is substantial and compelling,” she wrote. “Beyond the significantly different and long lasting financial impact this choice involves, the most fundamental element of American democracy – fair, open and honest elections – is at stake.”
Hardball in commissioners’ court
Time is running out on DRE opponents, however. On Dec. 20, 2007, the U.S. District Court ordered the state Elections Commission to come up with a draft implementation plan for HAVA, which it has done, and although the no-nonsense, tough-guy U.S. District Judge Gary L. Sharpe let the Feb. 5 New York primary slip by with a rhetorical slap on the wrist in a supplemental remedial order a couple of weeks ago on Jan. 16, he has promised dire consequences if the act is not implemented by the fall primary season – or the November election, or November 2009 at the very, very, very latest.
As part of this implementation plan, by Friday, Feb. 8, New York’s local boards of election commissioners are required to choose whether to use a paper ballot with an optical scanner system or the dreaded DREs.
DREs are still very much in the running, despite all the bad press. They were front and center last week as voting system sales associates from Premier Election Solutions (actually, Diebold) hawked their wares at a convention at the Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs that was attended by the state elections board and county boards of election from all over New York.
Meanwhile, the forces against DREs are marshalling– locally in meetings and in e-mail blitzkriegs trying to get the sleepy electorate energized to influence the election commissioners’ votes.
Make them win the old-fashioned way: earn it
Electronic voting opponents are frightened that DREs will not only be creating ballots; machines are also scheduled to read ballots, even though a hand count is less expensive and more transparent. They maintain that hand-counted paper ballots are often used to settle disputes in close races and that hand-counting is an old-fashioned, trusted and widely used technique for counting votes. Hand-marking and hand-counting satisfies the HAVA regulations as long as a compatible marking device is available for those with physical impairments.
The campaign against DREs is asking that individuals contact their local elections commissioners to influence their vote.. In Dutchess, the commissioners are Frances Knapp for the Democrats and Dave Gamache for the Republicans. They both work at 47 Cannon St. in Poughkeepsie, and can be reached at 486-2473. To download a sample letter to send to them, go to: www.nyvv.org/newdoc/ActNowJan08/LetterToCounty.rtf
At a recent meeting at the Muddy Cup in Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner and voting advocate Andi Novick from the Northeast Center for Responsible Media spoke to an enthusiastic audience about the simple, transparent, widely practiced and age-old technique of hand-marking and hand-counting ballots. Hand-marking and hand-counting, they said, satisfies federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) regulations as long as a compatible marking device is available for those with physical impairments.
A public hearing was held at on Thursday, Jan. 31 at the Dutchess County Legislature Chambers in Poughkeepsie, after the Beat’s press time, to discuss how county residents will be voting for the next century.