NY: County Challenges Electronic Voting System

[Wilms]

County Challenges Electronic Voting System

By ADAM KLASFELD

Thursday, April 01, 2010

MINEOLA, N.Y. (CN) - Nassau County and its Republican and Democratic Elections Commissioners sued New York State for requiring that pull-lever voting machines "trusted" for more than a century be replaced with "computerized voting technology that is notoriously vulnerable to systemic hacking, tampering, manipulation and malfunction."

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Nassau County claims the state board approved the company's DS200 model based on "vendor promotional materials" alone and did not even get a test model until weeks after the vote.

Investigations by the St. Petersburg Times showed that the DS200 system repeatedly malfunctioned during the 2008 elections in two Florida counties, according to the complaint.

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Lever systems, invented in 1892 and used in New York for about a century, eliminated the reliance on "easily manipulated and destroyed" paper ballots, the county says. It adds that tampering with lever machines can usually be detected by the "trained naked eye," and a jammed machine "remains true" and accurate until the time it malfunctions.

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After passage of the state's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, electronic voting machines regularly failed state inspections for 4 years, until the DS200 passed certification on Dec. 15, 2009.

Even after that vote, State Board of Elections Commissioner Douglas A. Kellner acknowledged that the machines had "technical security and documentation issues," although he dismissed the problems, according to the complaint.

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http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/04/01/26056.htm