Chautauqua lever machines sold to scrap dealer

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

I'm sorry.



County scraps mechanical lever voting machines
March 1, 2010

MAYVILLE - The Chautauqua County Board of Elections recently completed a public auction sale of 81 mechanical lever voting machines to scrap dealer Archie Nichols Inc. of Frewsburg for $52.47 each, thus ending an era of voting for county General Election voters.

All county voting machines and many in New York state were produced at the now defunct Automatic Voting Machines Corp. of Jamestown. The most recent selling price for the approximately 700-pound election vote counters was about $2,000 for reconditioned models. Voting Machine Service Center, Inc. of Ellington most recently serviced the machines and previously offered after market manufactured replacement parts available for sale.

The county BOE was one of just 19 counties statewide and the sole western New York county that took part in a federal court supervised "pilot program" for full rollout of new optical scan ballot technology in 2009. The United States Justice Department had previously successfully brought a federal lawsuit against New York State to force compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.
...
The remaining 43 New York State counties will presumably catch up with Chautauqua County this year and will complete the court mandate of full voting machine replacement for all elections. The Chautauqua County "pilot program" in 2009 was conducted before the December certification of new voting technology by the New York State Board of Elections.

... more at the link

http://www.observertoday.com/page/content.detail/id/536684.html

[eppur_se_muova]

1. "thus ending an era of voting" -- more truthful than intended? nt

[Wilms]

2. I think Election Commissioner Norm Green has it out for levers and is making a statement.

Unless there's another reason for selling that few. They have a lot more where that came from. OTOH, maybe he figures that's all the (local) market can bear in one gulp.

He got the same letter that all NY county election officials received from their Nassau County counterparts asking them to join the lawsuit. So he knows there's effort to save them.

[Bill Bored]

3. Norm Green is a vendor schill. Has been for years. First for DREs; now for scanners.

His board of elections fraudulently jacked up the undervote rate for the lever machines in his county in the 2008 general election. That's kind of like a felony under NY election law, but no one prosecuted because no election outcomes were affected. It's just knowingly reporting bogus results -- that's all.

This is similar to how Sequoia is alleged to have manipulated FL's punchcard election results in 2000 by supplying sub-standard cards to counties. That's one of the things that made the election close enough to litigate over, and eventually steal.

The same tactics that brought us Bush's first term and resulted in HAVA and more computerized vote-counting (due to Congress' misguided response to the manufactured electoral "crisis" in FL), may have been used in NY to make the levers look bad enough to give people the impression that a new voting system was needed in 2008. But the levers work fine if properly maintained, and if computers aren't used to report fraudulent results on the web in counties such as Chautauqua.

Green's flamboyant and premature discarding of some lever machines is another move to make people think the ship has sailed and that the machines are no good. The plan would be to get the public to associate the levers with "junk" in their minds, while touting the "benefits" of the real junk: e-vote counting systems.

Meanwhile several of Norm Green's fellow election officials in other counties with a lot more clout than his, as well as citizens' groups, will be suing the state to keep the lever voting machines and avoid computerized vote-counting altogether. Those are my kind of election officials -- and I'm not aware of them committing any felonies under the NY Election Law either. They deserve MANY days in court!

[Bill Bored]

4. .