Reply #17: I'm suggesting incompetence that leaves the door open for malfeasance.

[Bill Bored]

And yes, some conspiracy too.

Our scanners failed quite a bit last year in the pilot. The way these failures have been whitewashed is a disgrace. Asking election officials a bunch of softball questions at public hearings that are supposed to be "oversight" hearings is a conspiracy as far as I'm concerned. This is exactly what happened last year.

There is also evidence that lever machine undervote rates were deliberately exaggerated in at least one county by using web reporting software in 2008. Not correcting that when given the opportunity to do so constitutes a conspiracy. We don't know how many other NY counties this occurred in, but we have one definite example. It made the levers look bad when they actually worked fine -- not unlike the substandard punchcards used in Florida 2000 that cost Gore the Presidency to fuel demand for new voting computers.

Sorry if you're not familiar with all that but it wasn't exactly front page news. Most of it is a matter of public record though.

Also, it's not just "us guys" that don't accept election outcomes determined by computers. It's people such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology and most computer scientists.

The problem is, most computer scientists, not also trained in auditing or statistics, were clueless in their approach to auditing elections until fairly recently. They knew computer counts couldn't be trusted, but they failed to provide a solution that would engender trust. (The 3% "audit" is an example of one such untrustworthy solution that many supported and perhaps still do.)

Meanwhile, we are expected to give up mechanical voting machines that for the most part can be trusted to provide very accurate counts on election night for ALL contests, before anyone can mess with them, and that also prevent overvoting AND vote switching by making them both physically impossible? Give me a break!

It's obvious which of these voting systems protects the constitutional rights of NY's voters. And we have accessible machines too, so that's not an issue.