New York Law Journal Reports on Florida 2000 Redux

[Bill Bored]

http://www.law.com/jsp/nylj/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202476450504&Court_Rejects_Challenge_to_Republican_Win_of_Nassau_Senate_Seat&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1

Court Rejects Challenge to Republican Win of Nassau Senate Seat
Joel Stashenko
New York Law Journal
December 21, 2010

ALBANY - Control of the state Senate is restored to Republicans as the Court of Appeals yesterday declined to order a manual recount of all votes in a Long Island election on which the balance of power in the chamber hinged for the next two years.

Republicans in January will enjoy a 32-30 majority over Democrats, the same margin Democrats had heading into the balloting.

-snip-

But in the Martins-Johnson case, an audit of seven of the 249 voting machines in the Seventh Senatorial District revealed a gain of only two or three extra votes for Mr. Johnson based on a comparison of paper ballots and the vote counts recorded by the scanning machines used for the first time in the state on Nov. 2.

-snip-

In arguments before the Court yesterday morning, Steven R. Schlesinger contended that the vote-count errors suggested by the audit of the machines in Nassau County indicated problems that could have affected the outcome of the Martins-Johnson race.

He said in an audit of 3 percent of the voting machines throughout Nassau County, problems of one kind or another were discovered. He argued that the only way to resolve questions to the satisfaction of voters was to count all the votes by hand.

Mr. Schlesinger argued, for instance, that there were 3,876 ballots cast on the new machines for which no votes for the Senate race were recorded.

-snip-

He said he also produced evidence before Justice Warshawsky from a statistician at the University of California-Berkeley who testified that "almost certainly the outcome could change" between Mr. Martins and Mr. Johnson based on the voting machine problems found in the Nassau County audit.

See: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x516989

[patrice]

1. Would our concerns about Bush era Justice appointments be relevant here? nt

[Bill Bored]

3. Hard to say. The US DoJ wants NY to count votes electronically but NY rolled over.

The state, led exclusively by Democrats for the last two years, did nothing to stop this debacle which was very predictable. That includes the Governor, the Legislature, the Attorney General (now the Governor-elect) and half the State Board of Elections, which is bipartisan.

It's clear to me that neither the Bush nor Obama administration cares much about trustworthy elections.

New York Democrats have failed quite miserably to litigate against these machines on behalf of the state and especially the voters, or to legislate requirements to check the system effectively with hand counts.

On the other hand, some Republicans and some Democrats are trying to STOP e-vote counting in the state by keeping lever voting machines which are NOT computerized and have none of the risks associated with punch cards, software or computer networking.

So I think it's more a question of who's more afraid (and realistic) about having computers run elections than anything else. But certainly this case went in favor of the Republicans and against Democrats and more importantly against voters' rights to know if their votes were counted as cast.

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that having paper ballots buys us nothing if they're counted by computers and not people. Anyone who's been paying attention also knows that almost no one in New York wants to hand count paper ballots.

Some continue to push their fake vote-counting agenda, knowing full well they will fail to get any meaningful legislation passed to deal with this problem, especially now with a divided, 2-party state legislature.

[molly77]

4. Yes, they would. Also the Supreme Court Justices.

[Bill Bored]

5. This is a NY State problem. The justices who made this ruling are State Court judges.

I'm not defending the Bushies, but whenever the Obama DOJ was approached about this issue, they did nothing to help the voters of New York. Letters were sent to them about the dangers of the new technology and they continued to force it on the state after the state rolled over -- even before the optical scanners were "certified" by the state.
See: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7570

[patrice]

2. and, oh yeah . . .

:grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: :grr: ~

[Bill Bored]

6. .