Battlelines Drawn On Optical Scan Voting System
Posted on Monday, 30 of November , 2009 at 7:55 pm
ALBANY—The State Board of Elections is scheduled to certify several optical-scan electronic voting systems at their meeting in Albany on Dec. 15.
Yet as that day approaches, serious problems with the use of these systems in the Nov. 3 election are emerging, according to Andrea Novick, attorney and founder of the Election Transparency Coalition.
Most glaring so far are irregularities in the NY-23 special congressional election. NY-23 happens to be the home of Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., nationally renowned election fraud investigator, Novick said. His rapid investigation into the Nov. 3 election reveals election results Phillips says are “impossible,” including more votes than voters, negative totals, and the like. His early findings are published in two online articles, “Impossible Numbers in NY-23,” and “First the Impossible, Now the Improbable in NY-23.”
“Given the mess in CD-23, certification of the scanners at this point would be a travesty,” testified Ulster Park’s Susan Holland at the Monday hearing before the State Senate Standing Committee on Elections in Albany.
At least one election official, Dem-EC Virginia Martin of Columbia County, has testified that she would refuse to certify an election where she could not verify the count. With optical scan voting systems, vote counting takes place inside a computer where it cannot be seen by observers, candidates, or election officials.
“Voters may never again see a lever voting machine in a NY polling place, but that’s not the biggest thing that would be missing from our elections,” according to Novick. “If the levers disappear, so do our voting rights, because we’ll never again know if the votes have been counted accurately.”
Novick’s group is preparing to file a lawsuit against the state of NY to have the new optical scan voting machines declared unconstitutional because they conceal vote counting from public view. Over 200 years of case law protecting the public’s right to transparency in its vote-counting processes would be obliterated by the new voting system, according to ETC. “Even when optical scanners appear to be performing smoothly, there is absolutely no way to know that their secret software has not been corrupted.”
The Association of Towns and 20 counties appealed to the State Legislature to repeal the Election Reform and Modernization Act, the law mandating the changeover from NY’s current transparent voting system to the optical scan system, yet the State appears determined to certify the new machines apparently regardless of whether or not they are trustworthy. 11-30-09
Category: Consumers, Government, New York State, Politics
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