October 20, 2003

Replacement Near, Old Vote Machines Are New York Issue

By ERIC LIPTON

James Parks, on his knees, struggled to find the one screw amid the 20,000 parts that would unjam the scraped and dented New York City voting machine he was repairing. Ray Crews, another mechanic, had a handful of thin metal straps, which he carefully threaded, one at a time, into the back of the 800-pound behemoth he was servicing nearby. And Jamie Wilkins used a screwdriver to flip back tiny copper switches in the endlessly complex guts of another battleship-gray machine.

Almost three years have passed since the Election Day debacle in Florida that generated calls for a comprehensive nationwide modernization in voting equipment. But this cavernous Brooklyn warehouse, filled with row after row of mechanical lever voting machines, purchased mostly when John F. Kennedy was in the Oval Office, shows just how far New York City has to go.

"It's sticking," Mr. Parks finally yelled out to Mr. Crews, a more experienced mechanic, as he tried to reset a vintage Shoup voting machine so it could be used in the Nov. 4 election. "I am trying to get to the screw. But I can't get to it."

New York State has a plan to buy new voting equipment, replacing New York City's 7,295 machines as well as the 12,000 similarly antiquated machines elsewhere in the state. The federal government has already delivered $65 million in aid to New York to get this modernization project under way, and up to $180 million more could ultimately come from Washington.

Though New York City's voting machines broke down 603 times in the 2002 primary and general elections, forcing thousands to vote by paper ballot, not a cent of the federal funds has been spent in New York State so far. And as each month passes, it is looking increasingly uncertain that the state will comply with a federal requirement that all the lever machines be retired by 2006.

"It is a very tight schedule, even without delay," said Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections. "It is going to be very difficult to do. And if we don't meet the deadlines, we are in violation of the law."

The federal government has the right to sue states that fail to comply, and to withhold aid.

Many other states are also struggling with voting modernization, with just a few, like Georgia and Maryland, already installing or ing new machines statewide. Just why New York is off to a slow start comes back, at least in part, to that perennial source of roadblocks: partisan-charged squabbling among the Senate, the Assembly and Gov. George E. Pataki in Albany. But in this case, it is more complicated.

A long list of fundamental questions must be answered about how best to remake the voting experience across New York State: what the new ballot should look like, how a new statewide voter registration database should be set up, what kind of security should be incorporated into the new machines to prevent fraud, whether there should be one machine statewide or several models, and who should the machines the state will buy.

Resolving each question will be hard enough. But the choices must come amid the charged atmosphere sure to form as lobbyists from the nation's biggest manufacturers of voting equipment descend on Albany, trying to grab a piece of what could be one of the largest voting machine contracts in the nation's history.

"This is going to be intense," said Brian O'Dwyer, a Democratic Party activist and a lobbyist for Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia, a California company, has also hired a Republican lobbying team, led by Jeff Buley, who was general counsel to Governor Pataki's re-election campaign last year.

"It is huge," added Dan McGinnis, senior vice president for domestic sales at Election Systems & Software, an Omaha, Neb., company that wants into the New York market.

Regardless of who wins the contract, voters will see the biggest changes in nearly a century. So a small army of government watchdog types is monitoring the debate, ready to intervene if politics intrudes on one of democracy's fundamental rights.

"How you run your election is a cornerstone of democracy," said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group. "We are very concerned that a voting system may be put into place that is less voter-friendly than the one we have right now."

Partisan Disputes

President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act into law in October 2002. From the moment New York State began to try to comply, politics intervened.

When Governor Pataki set up a task force to draft a plan detailing how New York would spend its cut of the expected $3.7 billion in federal funds, he passed over Thomas R. Wilkey, the executive director of the State Board of Elections, a Democrat, and instead named the deputy director, Peter S. Kosinski, a Republican, as the task force's chairman. Mr. Kosinski then filled most of the task force's other 19 seats with members of the Pataki administration or other Republicans. Mr. Wilkey has since retired from the agency.

Groups like Common Cause/New York and the New York Immigration Coalition had requested that the task force include disabled people, young voters and members of ethnic minorities. Unhappy with the result, critics accused the Pataki administration of trying to hijack the election modernization effort to benefit his party.

"From the start this process has been flawed, absolutely flawed," said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright of Manhattan, chairman of the Assembly's Election Law Committee and one of the Democrats on to the task force. "And I will blame the governor."

Mr. Daghlian, the Board of Elections spokesman, said it should come as no surprise that a Republican governor created a Republican-dominated task force. He said Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a Democrat, did the same thing the last time there were federally mandated changes in state election law. Now the Democrats, he said, "do not control this process" and are "moaning about not being in the loop."

The quarreling has implications for voters. One of the first federal requirements is to create a unified database of registered voters, to eliminate duplication and possible fraud that result from each county keeping its own tally. A 2004 deadline was set; already, New York has asked for a waiver until 2006.

Mr. Pataki had put $3 million in his budget plan for this year to start on the task, which is expected to cost $20 million. But the Assembly struck that money when it adopted, with the Senate, its own budget this year.

"Until there is an understanding that this is a bipartisan operation, the money coming loose will not happen right away," said Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., a Manhattan Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and of the state Democratic Party.

Joseph E. Conway, a spokesman for Mr. Pataki, said the governor was committed to moving expeditiously and fairly toward modernizing the election system. "These criticisms are just the same old tired partisan politics. New Yorkers know that the governor has worked to bring bipartisan cooperation to our election process."

Before the state can even start to buy new election machines, a fundamental question must also be answered about their design. New York is one of only two states that require a so-called full-faced ballot, which means that all the races and candidates, as well as any ballot questions, can be seen at once by voters. Party loyalists can easily flip switches down the line from race to race.

The mechanical lever machines were designed to accommodate large ballots. But most of the modern touch-screen voting devices, which resemble automated teller machines, cannot. They are set up so that a voter can scroll through one contest at a time. Advocates for disabled people prefer the scrolling machines, as they are smaller and easier for a person in a wheelchair to use.

New York State officials have not taken a final stand on the issue. But sides are forming. C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, and State Senator Liz Krueger, both Democrats who have issued reports on the election modernization effort, each concluded that the state should abandon the full-face ballot requirement, citing the disadvantages it will create for disabled people. They also said it limited the options of manufacturers.

Some Republican leaders, meanwhile, say they want to keep the law as it is. "I think people ought to be able to see everything that is going on at one time instead of flipping menus," said State Senator Thomas P. Morahan, a Rockland County Republican and the chairman of the Senate Elections Committee. "I don't believe I would be able to get a bill out of the Senate on changing the full-face ballot."

That is only the start of the unresolved questions that may turn into partisan disputes. The Assembly, as well as the Election Commissioners' Association of the State of New York and the New York Public Interest Research Group, has pressed to have a single new machine statewide, arguing it would make maintenance and training easier and be better for voters who move within the state.

But Mr. Kosinski, whom Mr. Pataki has hinted he would like to see named permanent executive director of the Board of Elections, said he thought the state should simply certify the electronic machines that meet state and federal requirements and then leave it up to the local governments to pick the one they want. "New York has always had a decentralized system of elections," he said.

The list of politically charged issues goes on and on. The new federal law, for example, requires that certain voters who have registered by mail present identification when they show up at the polls for the first time. Democrats, who have almost twice as many registered voters in New York State as Republicans, want an expansive list of acceptable forms of identification, including college identification cards and public housing rent statements.

"If you have too strict adherence to identification procedures, it could lead to possible disenfranchisement and suppression of votes, especially in communities of color," Assemblyman Wright said. "In the history of the United States, this has happened many times before, and I have seen it happen in New York."

Working through these and other sensitive issues, such as ensuring that the machines are essentially fraud-proof and tamper-proof, will not be easy, some critics said. Though Mr. Pataki's task force produced a report that is supposed to be a framework for moving forward, it offers few solutions, they said. "The state plan succeeds only in putting off or pushing down to the staff or county level the critical decisions that must be made," said Jeremy Creelan, associate counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a voting rights and election reform group. "The process, from the beginning, has been a sham."

A Century of Controversies

In a way, it should come as no surprise to New Yorkers that a voting machine contract would generate controversy. Since the first mechanical voting machine was introduced in the United States — in 1892, when an upstate New York inventor named Jacob H. Myers turned his fascination with bank vaults into the "automatic ballot cabinet" — acquiring the machines for New York has been a touchy process.

Buffalo and Rochester moved to adopt the machines early on, buying into promises that they would "protect mechanically the voter from rascaldom, and make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret." But New York City fought an order by the state in 1925 that it abandon pencil-marked ballots for the supposedly more efficient machines.

"I can see the day when good Americans can sit motionless in their chairs and live without touching anything," complained John R. Voorhis, then president of the city Board of Elections, after the city backed down and finally purchased its first complete set of election machines.

When New York City moved to buy a second generation of machines in 1962, a lawsuit nearly blocked the purchase, this time with claims that the contracting process had been corrupted.

Pressure started to build on the city to replace its 1960's-era machines after the 1984 presidential primary, as supporters of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first major black presidential candidate, charged that there had been too many machine breakdowns in predominantly black neighborhoods.

But even before the city had awarded a contract for computerized voting machines, there was controversy, with one lobbyist claiming he had been asked for a bribe and a secret city report on the contest turning up in the hands of one of the bidders. Ultimately, the city spent at least $4.5 million on consultants and other costs, but the machines never arrived, partly because a contractor could not deliver vote-counting software that satisfied the city.

Though neither a mechanism for awarding a contract nor specifications for an acceptable voting terminal have been agreed to yet, lobbyists for manufacturers have been gearing up.

The most aggressive campaign has come from Sequoia Voting Systems, which won the New York City contract in the 1990's but was never allowed to deliver on it.

To pitch to Republican lawmakers in Albany, Sequoia has hired Mr. Buley, a legal consultant to the New York State Republican Committee and a counsel to Governor Pataki's 2002 campaign, at $7,500 a month. Mr. Buley said he has met with staff members from the offices of Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, and Senator Morahan, the Elections Committee chairman, among others.

Sequoia also has a Democratic lobbying firm, the law firm O'Dwyer & Bernstien, which is earning $10,000 a month. When that firm learned that Assemblyman Farrell had concerns about whether elderly voters would be able to adjust to computerized voting machines, a Sequoia machine was brought in and a demonstration was organized for Mr. Farrell's staff at a Washington Heights restaurant in northern Manhattan.

Elderly voters were recruited from local community centers, with an offer of a free lunch. A bus was chartered. And for about $4,000, Sequoia's lobbyists delivered a litany of testimonials about how easy the Sequoia machine was to use.

"This won't be too hard," said Mary Frances Howard, 76, a regular at the Wilson Major Morris Community Center at 152nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which sent about a dozen volunteers to the demonstration and free lunch in June. "It is easy."

Mr. O'Dwyer said the event was a success. "He is very important," Mr. O'Dwyer said of Mr. Farrell, who sent his chief of staff to the event. "His concerns have to be our concerns."

Because of Sequoia's aggressive early lobbying, some call it the front-runner for the contract. "There is an undercurrent up here in Albany that says Sequoia is a lock," said Assemblyman Wright. "I think it is horrible."

But Sequoia is not the only firm going the lobbying route. Diebold Election Systems, based in McKinney, Tex., and known mostly for its A.T.M.'s, is spending $12,500 a month to retain Greenberg Traurig, a Manhattan law firm. Greenberg's lobbyists are Robert Harding, former deputy mayor under Rudolph W. Giuliani, and John Mascialino, a lawyer and former first deputy commissioner of a city agency charged with buying equipment and supplies under Mr. Giuliani.

Election Systems & Software pays Davidoff & Malito, one of the state's biggest lobbying firms, $10,000 a month. Its senior partners, Sid Davidoff and Robert Malito, are former aides to Mayor John V. Lindsay.

Liberty Election Systems, a new outfit owned by the executives of an Albany printing company that has produced election ballots for decades, is spending $3,000 a month on lobbyists from Capitol Group.

Mr. Daghlian of the State Board of Elections said that regardless of any lobbying pitch, no preference would be shown in evaluating voting machines. "There will be no sweetheart contracts with anybody," he said.

Parts by the Thousands

John P. O'Grady, New York City's chief voting machine technician, was hired by the city Board of Elections to help oversee the addition of computerized voting machines when his daughter was 1 year old. Today, Megan, the daughter, is 12. The city still has not installed its first computerized machine.

"I can't wait to see them, I just can't wait to see them," he said. "I know it has to come, and the mechanical machines have served the city well, but the city and its voters deserve a more modern machine."

Until that happens, he spends his days leading a crew of 65 full-time mechanics who work out of warehouses like the one at 645 Clinton Street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. In just this one warehouse, 2,200 machines are stored, each with dents and other marks that attest to decades' worth of city service.

Keeping them running is not easy, as all the knobs, springs, straps, gears, cogs, rollers, screws, counters and green, cherry, yellow and white light bulbs must be constantly checked and rechecked. "Wear and tear will break you down," said Jamie Wilkins, 44, a machine technician from International Election Systems, a New Jersey contractor hired by the city to repair and prepare the machines for elections.

Yet even with weeks of effort by Mr. O'Grady's army of mechanics, the Shoup machines are breaking down too often, he concedes. In the November 2000 election, the last presidential contest, 412 machines broke down citywide for an average of 45 minutes to an hour each. As a result, 20,717 voters had to use emergency paper ballots, leading to lines so long that some voters gave up. Last November, when turnout was lighter, there were still 358 breakdowns among the 6,788 machines in use.

The city at least has a sufficient supply of backup parts, like the thousands of extra black metal levers at the Brooklyn warehouse. Far from the goal of beginning a phase-in of new machines by 2004, it will have to do for now.

"Let's get this thing done," said John Ravitz, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, a Republican who is also a former member of the State Assembly. "Let's settle the differences in Albany and give us the opportunity to bring a modern system to the voters of New York."