Brennan Center Sues NY Over Seasoning in Poisonous Brew

[Wilms]

Brennan Center Sues NY Over Seasoning in Poisonous Brew

Lawsuit Dishonors Justice Brennan’s Name

The Brennan Center For Justice has filed suit against the NY State and NYC Boards of Elections to prevent election officials from configuring newly purchased optical scan voting machines in a manner that would disfranchise large numbers of voters. The suit, filed on behalf of NAACP, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the Working Families Party and other plaintiffs, seeks to compel election officials to use procedures to prevent votes from being disqualified when a voter selects too many candidates in a particular race, known as “overvoting.”

Of course it is important to require procedures to prevent overvoting, but The Election Transparency Coalition (ETC) has repeatedly insisted that all protective procedures New York has enjoyed for centuries be maintained, including the opportunity for meaningful public oversight of our elections. The Brennan Center’s lawsuit, by focusing on a single protection, fails to address the much more significant problem: the State’s insistence that counties deploy concealed fraud-enabling vote-counting technology in the first place!

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Nassau County has filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court similar to ETC’s upcoming suit and a federal judge has ruled that federal law does not require replacement of lever voting machines. Yet the Brennan Center’s case continues to promote the widely held misconception that the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandates replacement of NY’s trusted lever machines. The State of NY had also made this erroneous claim and argued that Nassau’s case must be tried in Federal Court. But last month, Federal Court Judge Joseph Bianco rejected the State’s arguments and remanded Nassau County’s suit back to State Court. As Nassau had argued, New York has been in compliance with HAVA since 2008, when the State augmented the lever voting system with ballot marking devices at every polling place to increase accessibility for voters with special needs.

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http://electiontransparencycoalition.org/2010/07/12/brennan-center-sues-ny-over-seasoning-in-poisonous-brew/