“All this push in NY against DREs has gotten us to the point where many understand the dangers of voting on DREs- but if we succeed in getting Opscans we’ll be in the mess NH is in now. People don’t understand- you can’t legitimately recount an election if you don’t have chain of custody of those ballots after election night. I have been doing a lot of research lately on election law in NY which I’ll share at this meeting- the gist of it is in NY when the courts understood what a democratic election required (back in the day when we hand counted our ballots)- there were almost no recounts permitted after election night and for a very good reason: The first count- with all the safeguards the legislature put in to prevent against the efforts by insiders to manipulate the vote– was the most reliable count. Once election night was over- and all the watchers and officials went home– in other words once there was no more public scrutiny- those paper ballots sealed in boxes were considered highly vulnerable to manipulation because they’d lost the scrutiny of the polling place. People today tend to think that recounts are the answer to our problem. They’re not. Transparent, observable tightly run elections are the solution and neither DREs nor Opscans can provide that because watch all you want- you cannot see what goes on inside a computer whether that computer is located inside a DRE or an Opscan.”

I think it would be really great if you could do another post explaining all these details.

Apparently there are large differentials between the expected results and the official tallies in the returns which came from opscans in New Hampshire and those from the hand-count precincts. It has recently been reported that secretive vote counting is clearly prohibited in Article 2 of the South Carolina constitution, yet they use DREs and will do so in the upcoming primary. So lots of unanswered questions as well as legal issues to be resolved both at the state and federal level. Could the feds force NYS to vote in a manner that violates the state constitution?

Best, JLML

The BIGGEST problem at the moment is Microsoft. Most of the machines use Microsoft software for some part of their programming and the NYS standards require escrowing the code Microsoft (who has been lobbying the NYS lags like you cannot believe) refuse to deposit the code in escrow.

NYS is looking at trying to develop it’s own system from scratch using open source code.

If hat can be done in time for the 2009 timetable, then Diebold et al are screwed. And NYS may end up exporting the machines if they are a success.

If that happens there will be such a delicious irony to the whole thing. Seriously NYS Bof E has been really doing a heroic job trying to save the idea of fair elections.

Thanks Sara. Although my preference is for paper ballots, hand-counted in a manner which is publicly observable, the uniformly applied protocols you cite and the use of off the shelf, open-source (non-proprietary) software which could be run by state employees would go a long way toward making optical scan counters acceptable for use at each precinct.

I served as an alternate on my State interium Legislative Commission that decertified both the mechanical machines and the punch cards in about 1987, for different reasons. Error rate on Punch cards was way too high, and down time on election day on the mechanical ones made for long waiting lines at the polls.

We adopted the paper ballot — Scanner in the Precinct method — because the survey research people told us (and provided the data) that the most accurate method would be the one most like ticking off items from a “to do” or grocery list because more people were more familiar with that custom than any other system on offer. They had 45 years of research data on this matter. But they insisted that along with the system, we had to put audits into law — whioh we did. Before we certify an election, we do two tests — a random selection of precincts that are hand re-counted and compared with scanner results, with the random selection made after the election is complete, and recounts of any precinct that presents results outside the existing index. Along with this, a very liberal rule regarding how candidates and parties can request full recounts is necessary. Of course state by state you need rules on whether the scanner “reads” a ballot for clear mistakes, such as over-voting, and allows for corrections while the voter is still in possession of the ballot. (You can’t do that with central scanning systems, and you should not have a mixed system in any state. The Error rate of over-voting cannot be corrected with a central scanning system, and the Error rate is significant in a close election.) There are also many ways to accomodate the disabled while using paper ballots that are scanned. There are Computer systems that will mark a paper ballot using voice (for the blind), and you can’t distinguish that ballot from any other.

I remember sitting through hearings on the type size and fonts to use on ballots — rules we eventually put into state law, and in the process learning how in one election or another, such technical matters made the difference. I am convinced that is the key that somehow we managed to adopt before all this became controversial. Likewise the language used on a ballot giving voters instructions. We actually got the survey research folk to test and determine whether an instruction: “Vote for up to three” or “Vote for three or less” in a school board election where there are three vacant seats, produced more or less error. We put the best language into State Law. I recommend the approach. The key is clear state law combined with a straight forward system. One thing we ended up doing as a commission was to rip about 90% of the accumulated rules about ballot counting out of existing state law.

In so called ‘primitive’ societies, very often, those who lust for power are, absolutely and deliberately, not permitted it. Smacks more of ’sophistication’ than lack of the ‘civilization’ we would (and have)
foisted upon such peoples.

Would ‘Im-PEACH-ment’ help?

This is precisely what America desperately needs today. I couldn’t agree more.

I think Congress is just too damn lazy and ill informed and got punked AGAIN

I’m sorry to hear that. Until it is generally known and accepted by the American public that Congress has been malevolently working in opposition to the interests of the great percentage of the population we aren’t going to have the sort of upheaval in our politics that we need. I sincerely doubt that many Republicans got “punked” by the HAVA bills authors. I would have to say it is more likely they got “comped” with junkets to fine hotels, golf courses, etc. and it goes without saying that money flowed into campaign coffers.

A handful of Democrats may have been naive and voted for HAVA because they honestly thought that it would help. But not many. I find it impossible to image that a Congressman or Senator with a million dollar budget for a staff of analysts would have less understanding of the legislation than a solo researcher like me. So, I reject the idea a significant percentage of Congress got hoodwinked into voting for HAVA.