Long live the voting lever

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — New York is in last place among all the states to update their voting machines. Now, there’s movement not to update the old lever machines at all.

Priscilla Bassett of the advocacy group Senior Legislative Action Committee took the podium at the government center on May 21 to urge county lawmakers to send a message to Albany, telling state representatives that they don’t want optical scanning machines and would prefer to keep the old lever-style machines that have served state voters for more than 100 years.

Bassett explained that because of threatened legal action against the state, every polling place in New York now has a ballot-marking device that can be used by people with disabilities who can’t easily use the lever machines. Because of this, the state is now compliant with the federal Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the vote-count nightmare in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.

However, a state law passed in 2005 requires all counties in New York to replace the lever machines. Most counties will use the lever machines in the elections this November, but 16 counties in a pilot program will use new optical scanner machines.

Bassett said that while the scanner machines were better than the touch-screen machines that have been discredited in so many other states, scanners are still vulnerable to hacking. She said, “Optical scanners have proprietary software counting programs that can be changed without the knowledge of the operators or the voters. The lever machines cannot be programmed to invisibly switch votes. At this time, only the tried-and-true lever machines preserve our right to the secure and accurate count of our votes.”

She brought the same message to a meeting of the general services committee a week earlier. At the time, Rodney Gaebel, commissioner of the board of elections, said that he agreed with the idea that the new scanner machines are expensive and, perhaps, not necessary, but he said the process of changing the machines in Albany was too far along to be stopped.

County lawmakers, however, unanimously passed a resolution asking the state legislature to change the 2005 law and allow counties to keep their lever machines. Sullivan County now joins Ulster and nine other counties in passing similar resolutions.

Also fighting to retain the lever machines is a group called the Election Transparency Coalition. One of its members, attorney Andrea Novick, testified at a senate committee on elections in Albany on May 4 that both paper ballots and electronic ballots are more vulnerable to undetected tampering than are mechanical lever machines. She said her group is prepared to file a lawsuit over the matter, if needed.

On the other side of the debate, however, are groups such as the League of Women Voters, who argue that levers don’t allow people to make sure their ballot reflects the way they intended to vote. And they don’t provide a record of individual votes or a paper record that can be used for a recount if necessary.