Black Box Voting in New York?  Current rating: 1  
by Sarah Turner   NYC.IndyMedia.Org  18 May 2005  
The future of New York State's elections is currently being decided. If voting machine manufacturers get their way, New Yorkers will cast their next federal election ballots electronically. But Bo Lipari with the grassroots organization, New Yorkers for Verified Voting, has been traveling the state exposing the potential pitfalls of this 21st century technology. On Sunday he spoke at the Community Church of New York. Sarah Turner has the story.

Following public outcry over the debacle of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida, Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" or HAVA. The Act is a national one-size-fits-all piece of
legislation that lawmakers say fixes a number of election system
problems.

But New York's Senators weren't as happy about the solution as the rest of the country - the only two votes against the legislation in the U.S. Senate were those of Charles Schumer and Senator Hillary Clinton.

Bo Lipari is with New Yorkers for Verified Voting.

[Lipari 1] "How are we going about deciding the way that New Yorkers will vote in the 21st Century? Here's what we're doing. Politically well connected voting machine companies are aggressively pushing touch screen voting as the only option New York has. They've spent over one million dollars - ladies and gentlemen - who as we speak are right now out among our legislators, state and county election officials, our town and county executives, budgetary oversight committees telling them the same message."

HAVA states that all of New York's lever machines must be removed. The question, according to Lipari, is what sort of machines will take their place. One possibility: Direct Recording Electronic machines, or DRE's, such as the Diebold company's infamous touch-screen voting machines. Lipari wants to make sure they don't become the successor.

[Lipari 2] "So we have a lot of lever machines to
replace in New York State ? about 20,000. 20,000 DRE's times $10,000 a piece ? that's a lot of money. $200,000 million ? that's a really nice chunk of change. And this in my opinion is why those touch screen voting machines make an awful lot of sense for the manufactures."

Supporters of touch-screen systems say that although the machines do not have paper ballots, they can generate reports on paper. Lipari believes that's not good enough.

[Lipari 3] "DRE's can't guarantee that your vote is recorded correctly."

A software engineer by trade, Lipari prefers optical scan ballots which are not tied into a central computer and therefore less vulnerable to hackers. With an optical scan system voters fill out a paper ballot and feed it into a scanner. The votes are tallied, and ballots are deposited in a locked compartment, where they can be hand-counted in case of a close election.

[Lipari 4] "Now it's not like voting with paper
ballots is some untested or unused voting system. As a matter of fact, 46% of counties, 36% of precincts and 35% of voters used paper ballots and optical scanners in the United States during the 2004 election. These systems have been performing reliably for over 20 years, but up until a few months ago, hardly anyone was talking about this other option."

With New York at risk of losing between $150 and $200 million in federal funding, negotiations between the state assembly and senate lawmakers are fast coming to a close. The most likely deal would give individual counties the authority to choose between touch-screen machines or optical scan technology.

If that happens, Lipari and others will be forced to contend with voting machine lobbyists in all of New York State's 57 counties.