New Yorkers Sold Down the River, Pilot Will Put Uncertified Voting Machines in 45 of 60 Counties

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Another title might be New Yorkers sold Piece O Crap Voting machines.

The New York State Board of Elections has voted to aid voting machine vendors by allowing "pilots" of uncertified voting machines.
This pilot will put nearly 1 million votes at risk. In case you didn't know, pilots are Trojan Horses, they are a way of sneaking the camel's nose into the tent. Then in a bit, the entire camel takes over the inside of the tend. In the name of "election pilots" the law is broken, election transparency betrayed.

New York Rolls Out Uncertified Voting Systems for 2009 Elections

E-Voter Education Project Friday, May 22, 2009Posted by Howard Stanislevic

ALBANY -- At a May 12th Commissioners' meeting, after collaborating with the US Dept. of Justice, the New York State Board of Elections cavalierly decided to risk the disenfranchisement of nearly a million of the state's voters, by allowing what one commissioner called a "huge pilot" of uncertified software-driven electronic vote-counting systems around the state in 45 of its 62 counties.

Here are the links to the Commissioners' resolution, and other documents containing the details of the plan:


Authorizing Resolution 05/12/2009 (PDF 50KB)

Pilot Plan Narrative 05/12/2009 (PDF 65KB)

Timeline 05/12/2009 (PDF 492KB)

County Participation Spreadsheet 05/12/2009 (PDF 42KB)

Over 900,000 voters (read: guinea pigs) could be affected by these irresponsible tests, which one county election commissioner, perhaps unwittingly, compared to filling out lottery tickets. Gambling with the votes of a million New Yorkers is hardly a way to instill public confidence.

The plan contains almost no provisions for manual recounts of the paper ballots to check the computer tallies, other than those that might be obtained through the courts. The only exceptions are for contests with a margin of victory of 1% or less. Full recounts of those contests will be conducted, but we bristle at the suggestion that the victory margin reported by the uncertified voting system will be the one used to determine whether or not the hand count to check the system will take place.

Commissioner Douglas Kellner made a motion at the May 12th meeting to allow any candidate to ask for and obtain a full hand recount. His fellow commissioners defeated it by a bipartisan 3 to 1 vote.

... more at the link

So you see the folks pushing for these Piece-O-Crap voting machines know that their purpose is defeated if full hand counts can be requested.
Because the hand counts will prove the machines can't count accurately, or are not counting honestly.
The whole point of voting machines is to let the computer decide.

[aquart]

1. Manhattan?

[Lasher]

2. No real need for a pilot.

There are uncertified software-driven electronic vote-counting systems in other states to observe, if they really want to see how this works out.

[Wilms]

3. Formerly levered state, CT, is a prime example.

The following headline says one thing about CT's optical scam, but the article says the opposite. By my count, the tally was off by an amount that is >50 times the allowable HAVA error rate. But it's ok by the SoS because "she'll be working with local election officials to reduce errors in counting". :sarcasm:

UConn Audit Shows Election Machines Accurate

snip

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz (BYE'-suh-witts) had commissioned the independent review by University of Connecticut computer science experts. She says the small number of differences found between machine and hand counts were from human error.

The UConn reviewers looked at more than 1,300 records of races. They found that that only 6 percent showed a discrepancy of more than five votes between machine counts and hand audits. The largest was nine votes.

Bysiewicz says there were some problems with memory cards used to tabulate the vote count. She says better training will be done in handling the memory cards and she'll be working with local election officials to reduce errors in counting.

http://www.courant.com/topic/wtic-election-audit-0514,0,7726375.story?track=rss-topicgallery

[Lasher]

4. Almost as though they go ahead with machines regardless of test results.

Ya think?

[Wilms]

13. Indeed.

Diebold admits the audit logs of their systems, nationwide, would fail to log someone accessing the system and manually changing election results.

To my knowledge, not a single decertification resulted.

-edit to add-

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/diebold-admits/

[Bill Bored]

5. Judging from the way NY Dems have behaved, that Trojan Horse ought to be Donkey. nt

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

9. what are y'all New Yorkers gonna do? Any action alert? Heck raising?

Anything left to do?

Lawyer up?

[Bill Bored]

10. Like most non-lever elections, ours will be decided in one of two ways:

1. The Computers
2. The Courts

Actual vote counting is OFF THE TABLE of course.

Here's what the voters of NY have been doing for the last few years, slowly but surely:

They've just turned up the heat a notch, but I'm sure we'll get used to it.

[Bill Bored]

14. But to answer your question, THIS:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x513055

[Wednesdays]

6. K&R

:kick:

[diva77]

7. has there been any luck "following the money" - time and time again, facts

are brushed aside in favor of megacontracts to purchase and deploy proven FAILED machines that pose as "voting machines"

:argh:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

8. money a possibility, or laziness or perhaps desire to hide election problems

there's so many motivations for doing something this awful.

It could be just plain old stupidity.

[dipsydoodle]

11. Might seem to some to bit a bit antiquated

but you really can't beat the pieces of paper and pencils we use for both local and government elections in the UK and there is no real threat of that changing.

[clear eye]

15. Around here. computer counting accompanies

all official plans for paper ballots. As in Florida.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

16. Scotland bought into computerized voting because of "STV" a form of ranking votes

Scotland switched to computerized voting (scanners by DRS) for the May 2007 election.
This was because STV Single Transferrable Vote (form of IRV but for multi seat contests) was adopted.
There were 100,000 spoiled ballots and the machines didn't work well.

After the election there was an investigation and report.

The decision is that for now, the untrustworthy voting machines will be used just for STV for now, and once "the bugs" are worked out, it will be rolled out for all elections.

So, the spread of ranked choice voting is taking away the best election method there is, hand counted paper ballots.

NY is better off with lever, I can't forsee that state adopting HCPB.
There's also a movement to spread IRV in New York, which would help the voting vendors tremdously.

[kster]

12. Argue for paperless machine counting vs paper machine counting that

you and I will never be able to see much less COUNT them paper ballots by hand at the polling place at the close of election, we just keep playing in to their hands.

It really is laughable especially From the DU election reformers, the people that should know better.

They are playing us and they are winning, GOOD JOB!!

Oh and A big K&R