Considering the Alternative, New York Holds Onto Its Old-Fashioned Voting Machines

Considering the Alternative, New York Holds Onto Its Old-Fashioned Voting Machines
By Elizabeth Dwoskin The Village Voice Friday, May. 29 2009

New York City, Nassau, and Westchester Counties have refused to participate in a state pilot program to test out optical scan voting machines.



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.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/05/while_the_rest.php

And K&R for finding that story. I was searching the 'net w/o luck to see what my county had decided, and the Voice story you posted gave me the answer.
.......................:bounce:

the next federal election. Westchester County Exec. Spano has already invested (stolen?) too heavily in infrastructure to do a permanent U-turn now. See: What already happened last year in Westchester County, NY:

County Lawmakers OK Building Purchase

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5278/is_/ai_n27... /

The building was bought expressly to store e-voting machines in climate-controlled conditions. Note the line in the article where Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner reveals that the building costing $12M was bought from a large contributor to County Exec. Spano, and would sell on the open market for only $1.5M at the time it was bought.

Many county officials are having those kind of dreams about all that lovely federal money coming in and the big dollar contracts they will control. All that mouthwatering potential for kickbacks into campaign coffers.....:puke:

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUlw-GBWyvk

It's one thing to blow a bunch of money on overpriced ballot marking devices. It's quite another to start using them to count votes without serious audits or recounts.

Let them have their real estate deal. Just don't put the people's vote at risk in the process!

The County Legislature could pass a resolution without the Executive being involved, can't they?

Westchester corruption is a little off-topic, but it is causing real hardship. We have the 3rd highest taxes/assessed value in the whole country in a county that is well-off but not filthy rich. My sister and her husband both earn pretty good incomes, but they are thinking of selling their 2200sq.ft. home because the taxes are $25,000/yr!

The county legislature had to have gone along w/ the bldg purchase, so that tells us a lot about them. It also can't be separated from their corruptibility regarding potential e-voting system contracts. It's not like a crooked official will say, "OK, I've gotten my fill from 3 crooked deals this year, so I'll pass up another really lucrative opportunity because honest people feel strongly about it." Every padded or unnecessary contract would upset the constituency, if known, so the only calculus a crooked official does is the likelihood of proof of bad faith coming out. Even the appearance of corruption, like in this bldg deal, doesn't bother them, as long as no proof is going in front of a judge. A single-party gov't is especially susceptible to corruption of this sort.

A dead giveaway of a thoroughly corrupt party organization is when people offering to volunteer to build local party clubs are stonewalled instead of welcomed. See what happens where you live.

:kick:

its alot compared to many other states!
Enough to inspire the slightly greedy, much less
the very very greedy

This is the most current report on the EAC website

EAC Report to Congress on State Expenditures of HAVA Funds - July, 2008

State Governments’
Use of Help America
Vote Act Funds
2007

Coverage Period:
Title I: Section 101 and 102 Funds
April 2003 to December 2007

Title II: Section 251 Funds
June 2004 to September 2007


Table 2.1 – Total HAVA Funds Received and Expended By States 2 of 2
State
Total HAVA Funds Received($)a 219,512,672

Total HAVA Funds Expended($)b 16,312,955

Percent (%) of Funds Expendedc 7.43

Interest Earned ($) 27,313,610

Balance($)d 230,513,327

page 10 of EAC report here
http://www.eac.gov/election/HAVA%20Funds/docs/2007-report-on-hava-spending-by-states/attachment_download/file