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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/nyregion/31VOTE.html?pagewanted=print&positionThe votes of as many as 60,000 people in New York City may not have been counted in the 2000 presidential election because of an adjustment made to city voting machines back in 1964, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday by advocacy groups.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Working Families Party and a group of community advocates and minority voters, accuses the city and state boards of elections of disenfranchising these voters, who represented about 2.7 percent of the overall city turnout. The advocates say voters in poor and immigrant communities were more likely to have been among those whose votes had not been counted.
At issue was the decision to disable special sensor latches designed to prevent people from accidentally pulling back the levers to record their votes before they had finished picking their candidates.
For reasons that still remain a mystery, the city's election workers disabled those latches in 1964, taking away a built-in safeguard that advocates say would have prevented thousands of residents from losing their votes in every election.
The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, seeks to force city election officials to restore the latches on every machine, at an estimated cost of $275,000. "This is New York, not Florida; you want voting to work," said Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, based in Brooklyn. "This is a nonobvious problem that has an obvious solution." <snip>
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