New York Blog

While the rest of the country continues to adopt electronic voting machines -- even though they've been proven faulty when it comes to actually counting votes -- New York City is among final hold-outs. Local officials are clinging to the clunky lever machines that have been around since the sixties. The attitude is: Don't fix what ain't broken, especially when the new option is pretty broken itself.

Electronic and optical scan voting machines, according to Princeton technology professor Andrew Appel, are vulnerable to tampering by hackers. (Appel would know: A few years ago he bought a bunch of machines for his students, who easily hacked into them). Though they are required to be retrofitted with printers, we all know how often printers run out of ink and malfunction. Some states, such as New Jersey, have refused to certify the machines.

Three years ago, the Department of Justice actually sued the state, saying New York was the furthest-behind of all states in complying with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. (This wasn't all about the technology: The Justice Department was upset that New York hadn't spent millions of dollars in federal aid to modernize it. That may have as much to do with bureaucratic slowness as it does to do with some principled opposition to machines that could thwart the voting process.) Image (cc) mamasmusings.

New York State's new voting machines are failing in mass, two years after a federally mandated deadline for installing the machines for access by the disabled, and eight years after the Florida election recount debacle. Wired's ThreatLevel blog reports that New York State found flaws in 50% of voting machines supplied by Sequoia Voting Systems. Only certain New York counties selected to use the Sequoia machines, but big problems have turned up when machines have arrived visibly broken, too finicky to use, or mysteriously inoperative. In Nassau County, voting officials found problems with 85% of machines, including visible damage to 20%, which they rejected outright, prior to any testing. Many problems revolve around the machine's printers, a key component for ensuring access to the disabled.

These dinosaurs have got to go. But will the replacement voting machines be worse?

By John DeSio

A Long Island technology firm might just have the solution to bring fair elections, free from corporate greed and malicious manipulation, to New York State. And they’re willing to give it away for free. But the State Board of Elections' $2 million testing fee might keep money in the way of preserving the democratic process.

There may still be hope for the company, Open Voting Solutions, which has found a champion in Brooklyn City Council Member Darlene Mealy and numerous voting rights activists, all of whom are pushing for the company to see the fee waived as the first step towards eliminating the influence of the three major voting machine corporations, Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold), Election Systems & Software, and Sequoia Voting Systems, on elections in the State.