ONE NEW YORK COUNTY's FIGHT FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY IN THE FACE OF E-VOTE-COUNTING CRAMDOWN

[Bill Bored]

BOE begins hand count of ballots today

By John Mason
Hudson-Catskill Newspapers
Published:
Thursday, November 4, 2010

The county Board of Elections will begin hand-counting ballots from Tuesday’s general election today at noon, Democratic County Election Commissioner Virginia Martin told the Register-Star.

Totals reported so far have come from results tapes generated by the new optical scanner voting machines.

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Martin said there are at least 22,614 votes to be counted. “We’re bringing back the ballot counters,” she said, referring to humans who count ballots. She favors hand-counting over machine counting, she said, because she knows it’s more secure.

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Each machine has two memory cards with the results on them, one of which stays in the machine, with the other going to the Board of Elections. In Columbia County the cards don’t come to the BOE on election night.

“We haven’t done that,” Martin said. “The results have to be read out at the poll site anyway....That’s one of the safeguards in making sure that the results that finally come out from the board are not changed from the results read to the public,” she said.

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There’s a chain of custody: Ballot bags, used to transport ballots, and poll bags, used to transport other materials, from the polling places to the county offices...always have to be watched over by one person from each of the two major parties.

“We can never let any ballots out of bipartisan oversight, from the printer to the jail cell (where the ballots are stored),” Martin said.

She said she heard a lot of complaints about the new machines, mostly from people who didn’t see anything wrong with the old ones. With the old ones, she said, long lines weren’t as frequent. Tuesday, long lines were reported in Copake, Kinderhook, Stockport, Chatham and Clermont.

“Some of them had lines 30 or 40 minutes long,” Martin said. “People went to vote, saw the lines, came back, the lines were just as long, came back and had to wait a long time.”

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She said she would prefer to go back to the old, levered machines. The new system is much more expensive.

[Bill Bored]

1. Please K&R! nt

[Suich]

2. I wonder how long before we get rid of those machines altogether???

K&R!

[Bill Bored]

3. It will take a while. Someone cancelled your Rec, which was #5. Thanks anyway! nt

[Suich]

4. I'll be damned! So they did!

You're at 6 rec's now!

:hi:

[Bill Bored]

5. kick nt