New York voting future still uncertain

No new machines until 2009?

By FRITZ MAYER

ALBANY, NY — When New York was sued in March 2006 to force the state to buy new voting machines, some officials predicted the new machines would be in place by September 2007. Now, officials say they probably won’t be able to have the new machines in place until 2009.

Every other state had purchased new voting machines by last year. The machines were required under the federal Help America Vote Act. New York adopted rules that allow each county to decide which type of new machine would be purchased, but the standards the state adopted regarding the specifications for new machines were sufficiently rigorous that no machine currently on the market meets those standards.

That means that counties can’t choose a machine. Tim Hill, the Democratic board of election commissioner in Sullivan County, said his office has not yet considered the benefits of one machine over any others because no machines have been certified by the state.

Hill also said that it may be politically sensitive to introduce new technology in 2008, a year that will see heavy voter turnout because of the presidential election and the primaries. State board of election officials have indicated that they want to wait to introduce the new machines in 2009.

However, the United States Department of Justice isn’t at all happy about that possibility, and has filed a motion to compel the state to introduce HAVA-compliant machines in time for the primary in February 2008.

On December 20, federal Judge Gary Sharpe is scheduled to meet with both sides to determine the outcome of the issue. Of particular concern is a provision of HAVA that machines be accessible to disabled voters with a so-called ballot-marking device. Currently, there is one such device in each county in New York, but HAVA calls for a ballot-marking device to be available in each polling place.

According to Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the state board of elections, one of the options the judge might choose is to compel the counties to purchase more of the devices, which cost about $5,000 each. With counties having hundreds of polling places, the cost could run into substantial amounts of money. Daghlian said these devices work with optical scanning types of voting machines, and not with direct recording electronic systems (DRE). Therefore, in Daghlian’s view, this would likely mean an end to the discussion over which type of voting machine counties might choose, because the counties would be likely to choose optical scanners to save money.

On the other hand, the judge might also order the state board of elections to ignore the New York standards, and instead use ones adopted by the federal government, which are less restrictive.

Daghlian said there were three requirements adopted by New York that are not included in the federal standards. One is that the machines must have a verifiable paper trail (federal lawmakers are currently working on a similar provision.) The second requirement is that software for the machine be held in escrow by the state; software companies, such as Microsoft, won’t allow this. The third requirement is that the machines comply with New York’s full-face ballot law, which mandates that all races on the ballot be displayed on a single page or frame.

Because of these requirements, there were no machines readily available that could be certified in New York. Moreover, it turned out that the state was working with a testing company to develop certifiable machines, but the federal government had not certified the company to do this work. The state will start working with another testing company in January 2008.

Daghlian said New York lawmakers passed the legislation regarding the voting machines that was mindful of the problems that other states, such as Florida and California, have encountered with their new voting machines.