Apparent (Court Sanctioned) NY SD 7 Winner Says Other Elections Should Have Been Questioned

[Wilms]

Apparent NY SD 7 Winner Says Other Elections Should Have Been Questioned

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Howard Stanislevic

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On this point, we could not agree more.

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Some voting advocates too are to blame, since they insisted on replacing the lever voting system before laws needed to verify computerized election outcomes -- if indeed this is even possible -- were on the books. We are still waiting for such laws.

Martins' own county of Nassau has it right. Its pending bipartisan lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of computerized vote counting.

Columbia County also got it right when both election commissioners there agreed to do full hand counts of all contests before the 2010 elections.

Senator Patty Ritchie of the 37th District may also have it right. Her campaign filed suit, even when she was ahead in the count, claiming that “Upon information and belief, the machines employed in this election are computer operated optical scan machines which are prone to ‘hacking’ and other fraudulent attacks which can compromise the results of an election." To say nothing of the inadvertent programming errors or calibration glitches that have the same potential.

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http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2011/01/apparent-ny-sd-7-winner-says-other.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. More from the article...

First paragraph:

"Senator Jack Martins -- the apparent court-appointed winner of the contested race for State Senator in New York's 7th District -- wrote in a Jan. 10th Albany Times Union Op Ed that other election results in the state should have been questioned -- not just the results of his contest. On this point, we could not agree more."--from the OP

The first half of the article is about Martins' contest. Martins is a Republican. Apparently, R or D control of the NY State Senate was a close call. Martins complains that the media didn't focus on other close or questionable counts. The article says that the Martins contest was focused on because R or D control of the Senate was at issue. The article doesn't make clear (for us out-of-staters) what the upshot of that was. But the article DOES make these VERY IMPORTANT POINTS...

"No candidate should concede a race without strong evidence that he or she actually lost. Yet for many New York elections, neither our current voting system, nor our outdated legal system, provides such assurance.

"It's true that outcomes of other races nearly as close as Martins' were not verified in any meaningful way -- yet neither was Senator Martins' contest. Democrats and Republicans alike gave away their constitutional rights by not litigating more effectively for verification of software-based vote tallies and by not legislating such requirements when they had the chance."--from the OP (my emphasis)

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For those who aren't aware, NY was the last holdout in the country against unverified, private corporate control of the counting of our votes--which is now monopolized (80%) across the country by one private corp with far rightwing ties (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold). Virtually all of our votes are now counted by this corp using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that the public has no right to review--with very inadequate or NO audit/recount controls (half the states). NY recently caved to ES&S lobbying and has tossed their old, reliable, already publicly owned lever voting machines in favor of very expensive, shiny new ES&S voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET' code.

BE AWARE, friends--and do what you can in your local jurisdictions. (E-voting was never mandated by Congress. This coup d'etat was all accomplished with filthy lobbying. So it is still legally possible to go back to handcounted paper ballots or an OPEN SOURCE CODE system. But it's going to take a lot of citizen work--a vast movement, in fact, like the civil rights/voting rights movement of the 1960s.)

[Bill Bored]

2. The NY State Senate went narrowly Repulican. Had Martins lost, it would have been 50/50.

Some Repubs caved, but so did the Dems in other close races.

New Yorkers have been brainwashed into accepting Florida-style elections. We don't even try to count the undervotes.:crazy: