The Fight to Hold on to Our HAVA-Compliant Lever Voting System: Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

The Fight to Hold on to Our HAVA-Compliant Lever Voting System: Keeping the Air and the Facts Clear

By Andi Novick and Rady Ananda

July 28, 2008

"If citizens mistakenly believe that a court has already ruled against the legality of our lever voting system, they will give up and accept the unconstitutional system planned for 2009."

Let's Clear the Air distinguishes the facts from the myths about the status of New York State's electoral system. New York is the only state not to have computerized its electoral system and the only state that still has a secure, reliable, transparent, functioning electoral system. Since New York is in the process of installing ballot marking devices in every poll site, providing an accessible means for voters with special needs to vote independently, there is no justification for the State to abandon its now HAVA-compliant lever voting system.

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What happens next in New York will reverberate around the nation. It is therefore critical that we keep these facts straight.

In 2005, New York's Legislature passed the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), determining that it would comply with HAVA by replacing our lever voting system with a computerized voting system. Subsequently, it consented to an Order in federal court, implementing a timeline to replace our levers with computerized "crap" by 2009.

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We are the last state with a democratically-compliant, transparent, trustworthy, non-computerized, non-privatized electoral system. We are entitled to our day in court before we surrender our safeguarded electoral system to one that opens the door to known and new opportunities to fraud. We must fight to preserve our lever voting system now before it is replaced.

This is why we believe it is so important to keep the facts straight and accurate in the public's mind.

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New York's new law, ERMA, permits software-driven optical scanners or DREs to count our votes. Computer security scholars and professionals corroborate that software can be undetectably altered before, during and after Election Day, despite the most rigorous certification testing anyone might provide. ERMA, therefore, fails to ensure that the election night count is reliable. All we can do to attempt to verify the uncertain computerized count is manually count the paper ballots, but ERMA requires that the "audit" be done after the election is over after the results from all other precincts are known, after the press has announced the winner, and after ongoing public scrutiny of the ballots has ended.

The entire history of New York's Election Law, until ERMA, recognized that post-election ballot tampering is so probable that it has never permitted post-election verification of the secure, reliable, publicly observed first count. Under ERMA, not only is the first count (by software) undependable and concealed from the pubic, but the post-election "audit" is also unreliable, since the ballots being hand counted to verify the first count no longer enjoy the security of uninterrupted public scrutiny enabled by the many authorized watchers at the poll site. Under ERMA, the integrity of the verification is impugned, leaving the entire count unknowable and unreliable.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Fight-to-Hold-on-to-Ou-by-andi-novick-080728-948.html