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One of the rationales of the advocates for replacing New York’s lever voting machines with optical scanners was the creation of a “paper trail” of ballots which could be hand-counted for verification. However, in the first year of the use of optical scanners, New Yorkers are learning that getting permission to have those paper ballots hand-counted is a rare and expensive proposition, which might not necessarily end with the winner being the candidate with the most votes. The close election in New York Senate District 7 provides an example.
The auditing of the optical scanners in Nassau County continues despite last week’s unfortunate ruling by the NY Court of Appeals refusing to order a full hand count of the ballots. Republican candidate Jack Martins is now the certified winner of the race for the 7th District State Senate seat.
This presents the troubling possibility that the audit, which could eventually be expanded to a 100% hand count, will reveal that the declared (and by then likely seated) winner got fewer votes than his opponent, incumbent State Senator Craig Johnson, a Democrat.
According to the Court decision, even if it is revealed that the wrong winner was declared, the machine count of the votes will stand!
In the Nassau County race where approximately 85,000 votes were cast, the machine count showed Republican candidate Jack Martins leading Democratic incumbent Craig Johnson by 451 votes, a margin of only 0.5%. A spot-check (erroneously called an ‘audit’) was performed, with hand-counting of the paper ballots cast on 3% of the voting machines. Johnson went to court seeking a full hand count. The NY Supreme Court denied the request, and last week the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s decision, stating, “There is no substantial likelihood that the result of the election would be altered by the conduct of a full manual audit.”
In making the original decision, the Supreme Court apparently failed to understand the math involved. They simply multiplied the error rate found in the 3% sampling by 33.3 and concluded that a 100% hand count of the ballots would not wipe out Martin’s 451-vote lead in the race. Had they allowed the expert testimony by statistics professor Philip Stark, the Court would have understood that the situation called for more than a simple multiplication problem: the calculation should have included the margin of “victory” and the unlikelihood that the error rate in a 3% sample is truly representative of the whole. (With only 3% of the machines audited, there is a 97% chance that the machine with the most errors was not audited at all.) According to Stark’s analysis, “To have 90% statistical confidence that Mr. Martins won requires auditing a minimum of 90% of the machines selected randomly: an additional 218 machines.” And the 90% sample would have to be error-free.
Even Bo Lipari of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, which has long pushed for the replacement of lever voting machines with optical scan voting systems even without effective state audit/recount laws in the state of New York– much to the frustration of the Election Transparency Coalition — is appalled by the Court’s failure to understand the way spot-checking machine vote counts is supposed to work. His explanation is worth reading even though Lipari fails to acknowledge that the current situation is a predictable result — based on similar problems throughout the nation in recent years — of using the e-voting technology his group has pushed.
Will the State Senate race in NY’s 7th District follow in the footsteps of the 2000 presidential election, where courts declared Bush the winner of Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency, but later counting of the votes revealed that Gore had actually won Florida?
This week’s NY Court of Appeals ruling clearly illustrates one of the reasons the Election Transparency Coalition has fought the computerization of NY’s vote counting. Arguments that optical scan systems such as NY’s new voting system are safe because the computer count can be verified by hand counting of the ballots fall far short of protecting our sacred elections. All around the country, in election after election, the paper ballots are not hand-counted when they should be. Here in NY, a count is taking place, but not until AFTER a winner has been declared!
The accuracy of machine counts is only one of many problems with optical scan voting systems. With the new optical scan voting system, NY voters no longer have the overvote protection afforded by the lever machines. And when paper ballots are introduced and are not counted at the polling place in full public view on election night, the chain of custody of those ballots becomes as crucial as is chain of custody of evidence in criminal trials. Yet rigorous chain of custody procedures are rarely followed.
Voters have been left with a system that is neither accurate nor secure, a system that also lacks the transparency constitutionally guaranteed to NY voters. This is why the Election Transparency Coalition continues to work to bring back the state’s time-tested, accurate and transparent lever voting systems.
5 Comments
It is true that Bo Lipari of NYVV has long pushed for adoption of the paper ballot/optical scan system by NYS (as opposed to touch screen DRE’s which was the only other choice).
It absolutely false to state that he, or NYVV, supported implementing ANY system without effective state audit/recount laws in NY. On the contrary, Bo has been one of the loudest, most articulate, and most knowledgeable voices for implementation of effective audit and recount laws.
Statements such as the one included in this post only serve to divide those of us in NYS who are working for election integrity. I have news for you, the bad guys are the only ones who benefit from that division. We all fought for paper ballots because without them there is nothing to count (and levers are one of the least verifiable systems around.) We now need to keep on fighting for adequate audit and recount laws.
Since I recommended and linked Mr. Lipari’s response to the court decision, I am well aware of his concern with audit and recount laws. Any divisiveness is that being fostered by those who made the implementation of a paper-ballot op-scan system a higher priority than making sure that any system replacing the lever voting machines not become operative until all necessary rules and regulations for operating that system are in place. Without this the current situation in SD7 was predictable.
I was an early supporter of Mr. Lipari’s work to keep DRE ( touch-screen) voting machines out of New York, but once it was shown that HAVA did not outlaw levers or mandate the use of computerized voting systems and, as the scientific community demonstrated that all software-based systems including op-scans were highly vulnerable to undetectable mistakes and tampering, I was distressed that Mr. Lipari and his organization would not reconsider their position in the light of this information.
All software-based voting systems subvert transparency, the people’s right to observe how their votes are being counted. I believe that keeping our levers – ingenious, tamper-resistant mechanical voting machines, easily understood by the layman, (accompanied by ballot-marking devices to provide disablity access) and operated within our time-tested system of public procedures – is a superior alternative to their wholesale replacement by optical scanners.
If the optical scanners are a means of returning to paper ballots, perhaps we could agree to eliminate the ongoing expense of operating these faulty computers, and simply go straight to hand-counting as was done in Columbia County, New York this past election.
Lever advocates who claims that the former unverifiable NY lever/central tabulator system is superior to the new verfiable Optical scanner/central tabulator system are just blowing smoke.
It should now be obvious to anyone who has a brain the size of a pea: the NY voting system (as in virtually all the other states) is anti- democratic. It is DESIGNED to enable miscounts. If it’s not the election officials and/or the politiciams, it’s the judiciary.
Why don’t the lever machine advocates focus their efforts on the
source of the corruption? How can they ve so blind as to not see what they are up against? Election fraud is systemic. The only solution is a government mandate to implement a robust chain of custody and handcount the paper ballots. Isn’t THAT why the scanners were installed in the first place: to verify the machine counts? Follow the money.
If NY election officials really wanted fair elections, they would
check out a near-foolproof system that works: http://richardcharnin.com/OregonVsNYVoting.htm
Why don’t the Lever advocates focus on the root cause of the NY scam: corrupt election officials who did not have to worry about hand-counting paper ballots using the 100 year-old Levers. Now that paper ballots are available, they refuse to count them.
AND THEY STILL BLAME THE MACHINES!
Returning to Levers means returning to total non-transparency. That is just what the election officials want: business as usual. They are opposed to transparency at all costs. It’s no different than the PTB trying to shut down Wikileaks by any means necessary.
To(mis)quote Shakespeare: The fault is not in our machines, but in
ourselves.
A stasistical analysis proves that the New York lever system was fraudulent.
This FACT is IGNORED by the Lever machine advocates:
Votes are CAST on lever machines.
But…the votes are (MIS)COUNTED on central tabulators.
THEREFORE, THE NY VOTING SYSTEM WAS NEVER TRANSPARENT!
In 2004, the New York exit poll had a massive 12% Within Precinct Discrepancy (WPE). Kerry’s NY margin was reduced by 750-900,000 votes! By contrast, the National WPE was 7%. Paper ballot precincts had a 2% WPE.
Consider that…
1) Oregon votes by mail and NY by lever machines.
2) In the last three elections, late NY Democratic (paper) vote shares were 7% higher than Election Day (lever) shares.
3) In 2004, the average paper ballot precinct WPD was 2% and 12% for levers.
4) Kerry’s margin was 3.7% higher than Gore’s in Oregon (a battleground state), but 6.7% lower in New York (a strong Democratic state).
5) Kerry exceeded Gore’s margin by 8.9% in Oregon’s largest county (Multnomah) but Gore exceeded Kerry by 8.6% in New York’s largest (Kings).
6) Oregon’s 1.8% vote discrepancy in the telephone survey was far less than the other 14 battleground states average 7.5% WPD.
7) Oregon closely matched the 2004 aggregate exit poll after allocating returning Nader voters to Kerry and Bush.
8) Oregon paper ballots are available for hand recounts (see 254.525, 258.211, comments).
New York votes are cast on levers, but counted on computers; there is no way to verify them.
9) Gore won NY by 60.2-35.2%. Allocating the 4.6% Nader/other vote, Kerry wins by 63-36% – assuming equal Gore/Bush defection.
10) According to the Preliminary National Exit Poll, before it was forced to match the vote count, 10% of returning Bush and 8% of returning Gore voters. defected. Assuming these rates, Kerry’s NY margin increased 2% to 64-35%, matching the unadjusted NY State Exit Poll.
11) Gore did slightly better than his 60.2% NY recorded share after allocating 180,000 net uncounted votes.
12) In the two elections in which Clinton was the incumbent, the NY exit polls had an average 0.6 WPD .
13) In the three elections in which a Bush was the incumbent, NY exit polls had an average 8.0 WPD.
14) Oregon voters don’t worry about insufficient precinct levers, machine failures, vote counts terminating at 99, stuck levers, long lines, intimidation by poll workers, and unverifiable vote counts.
If one ignores all of the above, there is every reason for New Yorkers to “love those levers” – except for this: Even if everyone who came to the polls voted and all the lever machines performed perfectly, the fact remains that votes are counted by proprietary computer software, not open source, which can easily be programmed to switch votes that may or may not have been entered accurately. Ay, there’s the rub.
Poster Bill Bored on the Democratic Underground has commented on my above post. As usual, he misleads the reader by suggesting that I cannot explain how NY votes could be switched on levers.
It is typical misdirection on the part of a relentless Lever advocate. Bored ignores my factual statement that NY votes are MISCOUNTED on computers after being CAST on levers.
And he refers to the exit polls as “crap”. Very revealing, Bill. You must still believe Bush won without cheating in 2004 and that the exit polls were all wrong.
Bored writes:
“There are some comments on FDL worth reading too. And some not (exit poll crap that can’t explain how levers switched thousands of votes)”.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203×517162#517172
Bill Bored has been shilling non-stop for years on DU as an advocate for NY levers. He has never coherently addressed the fact that in NY, just like everywhere else, vote counting is done on UNVERIFIABLE central tabulators. He might as well be writing for the mainstream media: he assumes his readers don’t do their homework and are oblivious to the facts.
Instead of focusing on the real problem (corrupt NY judges, politicians and election officials who refuse to count the ballots) Bill shills for the Levers. Bill, your agenda is showing.
Why does Bill post on DU rather than FDL? Probably because he knows that he would be called out if he did. I’m calling him out anyway.