URGENT: New Jersey set to throw out Verified Voting

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

If you have a Daily Kos id, please go over there and recommend the diary. (If you don't, its free to register.)This needs to get spread all around to help pressure the "powers that be". New Jersey has the hackable Sequoias.

Urgent: New Jersey About to Do Away with Verified Voting
by Midwest Millian
Sat Dec 13, 2008
This is sickening.

Both Houses of the New Jersey Legislature will vote on Monday on the question of whether or not to eliminate - not delay, as they have done twice already, but eliminate - any legal requirement for voter-verified paper records on the state's voting systems.

If you live in New Jersey, click here to send a message to state legislators now. New Jersey folks only, please.

Midwest Millian's diary :: ::
New Jersey passed a law in 2005 to require voter-verified paper records on all voting machines by January 2008. The Rube Goldberg printers they chose for retrofitting on the Sequoia Advantage machines used in most of the state don't work, and as all states are, New Jersey is strapped for cash. But rather than gradually phase in an alternate, paper-based voting system such as precinct-based optical scan (the most widely used voting system in the country), and move the deadline to something achievable, the bills to be voted on Monday would establish a pilot program for the June primary, and leave it up to the Secretary of State whether or not to retrofit the machines with the crappy printers. Under the House version of the bill, the pilot may also include optical scan machines, but the Secretary of State would have no authority to implement an optical scan system.

And reportedly, the Secretary of State, Nina Mitchell Wells, already believes that the printer retrofits are not right for New Jersey. She is almost certainly right about that, given the failure of the printers to date, but an alternate voting system is not under serious consideration.

The paperless Advantage machines used in most of the state are unreliable, hackable, and have miscounted ballots in a Presidential primary. The Clerk of Union County actually encouraged voters not to use the machines and vote absentee in the November election. They are also notorious for undervotes in down-ballot questions, likely due to usability issues created by the "full-face" format, in which all the offices and measures display at once.

Optical scan systems, with accessible ballot markers for voters with disabilities, are more cost-effective than electronic voting machines. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt testified to the Senate State Government Committee on Thursday:

...more at the link
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/13/133622/31/519/672737

[midnight]

1. Optical scan systems also can be manipulated via the

calibration system when they are set up.

[Wilms]

6. Optical Scan can be manipulated in all kinds of ways.

And NJ has had an answer for that. Risk-based auditing. (.pdf) http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2006/Bills/S1000/507_R1.PDF

That makes the news all the more disappointing.

Here's something written earlier this year about NJ's audit law.

New Jersey's Post-Election Audit Bill and Its Importance to Our Nation
http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-jerseys-post-election-audit-bill_02.html

[Pab Sungenis]

2. I sent it. This is at the heart of my campaign for County Clerk next year, too.

I'm going to promise to NEVER certify an election held on black box machines, and work with the head of the BoE to put a reliable system in place.

[Gregorian]

3. Saturday night recommend.

What is wrong that sane people have allowed this to continue? What idiots.

Stop the phony machines now, until they are able to be used with certainty.

[Bill Bored]

4. Links to the bill and statement:

Bill:
http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2008/Bills/S2500/2380_I1.HTM

Statement:
http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2008/Bills/S2500/2380_S1.HTM

[bertman]

5. Rec to keep this one at the top.

[robinlynne]

7. optical scan systems are electronic tallying just the same as DREs. no difference

BECAUSE all the optiscan gives you is a way to verify the original ballots and recount, BUT judges deny that right over and over and over and order the same optiscan systems to rescan. SO the hypothetical existence of a verifiable paper ballot is USELESS IF YOU DO NOT HAND COUNT THE BALLOTS!!!!!!!!!

[Wilms]

8. Don't just blame judges.

If recount law doesn't exist or provide a recount for a given margin, that ain't a judges fault.

How about risk-based audits?

I suppose not everyone considers that as an answer. But for those that do, NJ has on the law books a true to life risk-based audit set, statistically, to give a 99% confidence that an incorrect machine count would be caught.

Of course, a paper ballot, or at least a VVPAT, is needed to implement the law.

[Wilms]

9. "...defeated in one house of the state legislature... in the other house never went to the floor..."

Daily Voting News For December 15, 2008

John Gideon

The news has not been written yet but I am hearing from New Jersey that the bill that would have forced the state’s voters to continue to use Sequoia Advantage DREs with no paper audit trail was defeated in one house of the state legislature and the bill in the other house never went to the floor for a vote. Now the state needs to decide whether to wait and hope Sequoia can get a vvpat printer certified or do the right thing and change over to a paper-based voting system....

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6748