Experts Shouldn't Be Needed to Call Outcome of Election

[Wilms]

Albany Times-Union

Experts Shouldn't Be Needed to Call Outcome of Election

By Howard Stanislevic

January 1, 2011

The Court of Appeals' decision in the state Senate District 7 case was flawed. Important testimony from experts -- including mine -- was never heard in its entirety. But the notion that our vote-counting problems would be solved if only we had full hand recounts of all very close elections is also flawed, and would not protect the interests of New York's candidates and voters.

The unheard expert testimony called for a 90 percent initial hand count of that contest because it was so close, among other reasons. But since machine errors had already been found in a 3 percent hand count, the experts upped their percentage to 100 percent to be certain of the winner. The trial court judge, however, refused to hear that testimony, and no higher court ordered him to consider it.

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However, in New York, a law to require 100 percent hand counts of contests with a margin of 0.5 percent or less would relegate all contests with margins of just a few votes more -- say, 0.6 percent -- to an inadequate 3 percent hand count. This would provide a huge incentive to stuff the electronic ballot box to increase the computer-generated margin, thereby avoiding the hand count.

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Standards developed by experts have been proposed repeatedly over the last few years to our one-party Legislature and two-party state Board of Elections. Our public officials were negligent not to enact such standards. They failed the voters of New York and passed the buck to the courts, which also ultimately failed the voters.

If scientific standards cannot be codified into our election law, then we would be far better off returning to our lever voting system -- the only machines that don't require a panel of experts to determine who won an election.

Howard Stanislevic is the founder of the E-Voter Education Project, a N.Y.-based group dedicated to the demystification of electronic voting. He was asked to appear as an expert witness by Sen. Craig Johnson's attorneys and assisted in the preparation of Professor Stark's testimony. His website is: http://e-voter.blogspot.com

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