NY: Watching and Waiting For a Return to Innocence

[Wilms]

Watching and Waiting For a Return to Innocence

Thursday, December 30, 2010
Posted by Howard Stanislevic

It has not escaped our attention, or that of our readers, that our last post was over a year ago, when it first became evident that New Yorkers would lose their voting system and have it replaced by a software-based system that our legal system is incapable of regulating. We called that post http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2009/12/end-of-innocence-ny-state-board-of_14.html">"The End of Innocence" and it covered quite a lot of ground.

There hasn't been a need to post anything more since then; we would just be repeating ourselves. We've met with the powers that be in both houses of the State Legislature responsible for making election law, and they have taken our suggestions under advisement. No laws have been passed to verify election results. But we've seen lots of interest in the National Popular Vote (NPV), Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and other practically unverifiable voting methods. Even Internet voting!

Perhaps in light of the state's highest court's Dec. 20th denial of a hand count in the NY State Senate District 7 race in which computers -- rather than voters -- determined which party will control the Senate, it's time for a quick review of how we got here.

New York has become the Florida of the Northeast....There is plenty of blame to go around....Those who are responsible for our current situation know who they are, although they may be in denial about it.

Here's what happened:

1. New York has a history of paper ballot fraud (Tammany Hall) which lever machines were effectively designed to prevent. We don't trust PEOPLE or PAPER unless they can be watched.

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2. Over the last several years, our public officials have heard very little from New York's precinct-count optical scanner (PCOS) advocates and "good-government" groups about the need for software-independent elections (software-independent voting systems are only the beginning!). The opinions of National Institute of Standards and Technology experts and other computer scientists about the need not to trust software, the ineffectiveness of the "certification" of software, BUGS in New York's actual voting system software, etc. have never been widely disseminated.

-snip-

3. The same lack of informed consent applies to the so-called manual auditing of elections counted by computers.

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4. Instead of the facts about NOT trusting computers to count votes, what our public officials and the media have been told is that:


* New York has the most "rigorous software certification process";

* paper ballots would be "available" for audits and recounts, "if necessary";

* NY would "RELY on the paper ballots";

* NY has a 100% "recount" law (the Election Law § 9-208 "recanvass," which never required recounts of ALL paper ballots, but only absentee, emergency and provisional ballots, and was recently amended only to require some form of ballot accounting).

All of the above provided New Yorkers who did not fact-check these statements with a false sense of security about our voting system, our election laws and our ultimate "reliance" on paper ballots to "verify" elections.

In other words, New Yorkers have been sold a bill of goods and the Legislature and Judiciary have heard very little to correct this record.

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http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2010/12/watching-and-waiting-for-return-to.html