Problems with New York’s new electronic voting system are being reported across the state today, according to the New York Times. Today’s primary elections mark the first statewide use of the new, paper-based optical-scan systems which have been been the cause of much controversy among election officials and Election Integrity advocates over the last several months and years in the Empire State.
New York is the last state in the union to replace their older election system — much of the state, as well as all of New York City had previously used mechanical lever machines — with new-fangled, failure-prone, easily-manipulated computerized systems following the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which was enacted in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election debacle.
In New York City, where Wall Street Journal reports the problems are “most severe” — including reports from Mayor Bloomberg on “reports of broken and missing scanners, poor customer service and poll sites opening two to four hours late” — the new systems are made by ES&S, the nation’s largest voting machine company, and one with a storied history of election failures.
The systems used in other parts of the state are largely manufactured by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting, formerly as a partnership with Sequoia Voting Systems. Dominion eventually bought out cash-strapped Sequoia’s portion of the NY state deal before buying out Sequoia entirely earlier this year. The purchase of Sequoia, then the nation’s third-largest e-voting firm, on the heels of their purchase of Diebold/Premiere just weeks prior, has vaulted Dominion, virtually overnight, to one of the largest e-voting vendors in the U.S..
[Read The BRAD BLOG’s recent exclusive on the Dominion purchase of Sequoia, and their attempts to cover up the continuing relationship that Sequoia has with a Venezuelan firm tied to President Hugo Chavez.]Some state election officials and Election Integrity advocates alike had long-warned against the implementation of these new systems, going so far as to take the issue to court and to testify to the inability of certifying the accuracy of elections run on the new machines.
According to the Times this morning, some polling places “did not open for more than 90 minutes” in Brooklyn; elsewhere, every ballot scanned “was returning a the ‘system error'” message; and across the state, there have been reports of “longer-than-usual delays and troubles with the scanners that are supposed to swallow and tabulate the new, SAT-style ballots”…
As reported by the Times today:
Some polling places in Brooklyn did not open for more than 90 minutes — and there was one report of a three-and-a-half hour delay — as election workers tried to get the new equipment to function. Senator Charles E. Schumer was held up when he arrived at Public School 321 in Park Slope just before the scheduled 6 a.m. opening: He and other voters had to wait 15 to 20 minutes before the machines were ready to take their ballots.
Even at polling places where the new machines seemed to operate correctly, it was slow going. At Public School 165, on 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, 80 people waited in a long line, waiting to feed the ballots they had filled out into the machine. At least one frustrated voter tried to bail out and throw his ballot in a wastebasket, though an election worker told him not to — it was against the rules.
Some voters were unhappy about having to give the completed ballot to election workers running the scanning device. “That’s not a secret ballot at that point,†said Paul Randour, 75, a retired lawyer who voted on East 79th Street in Manhattan. He insisted on inserting his ballot into the machine himself.
Empire Staters had the honor today of being among the last in the union to note:
And there’s this democracy-inspiring note from the NYT’s report [emphasis added]:
The poll worker told Mr. Rojas not to worry; every ballot was generating the “system error.â€
“Presumably the thing was actually tallied and the system error pertained to something else — that’s what the poll worker was saying,†Mr. Rojas said. “But it didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the whole system.â€
Setting aside the “system error” on “every ballot”, the most disturbing point in the above may be what we’ve been trying to warn the world about here at The BRAD BLOG for years: “Presumably the thing was actually tallied”.
There is, of course, no way to know if “the thing was actually tallied”, without actually bothering to count paper ballots by hand to know for certain, thus defeating the general point of using these horrible systems in the first place.
All of this, of course, could have been avoided, as New York Election Integrity advocates — as well as a number of election officials — have been fighting against the adoption of the new systems, after similar systems have racked up a disturbing record of failure across the nation since HAVA encouraged their implementation.
Some of the EI advocates in NY, such as New Yorkers for Verified Voting, had focused over the years on ensuring the state didn’t make an even worse choice by moving from levers to 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems after the U.S. Dept. of Justice had threatened to sue the state for not moving quickly enough to provide a voting system that could be used privately and independently by disabled voters, as per HAVA.
While the fight was won to choose optically-scanned paper ballots rather than unverifiable electronic DRE “ballots”, a campaign was waged by other advocates to keep NY’s mechanical lever system, which has been used there for decades, in place. Court battles continue on that front, and problems in today’s election will no doubt come into play in that law suit.
One election official, Columbia County’s Virginia Martin reportedly stunned a State Assembly panel last year when she testified that she’d not be able to certify the accuracy of her county’s elections unless paper ballots were 100% hand-counted.
“The mandated transition to electronic voting and vote-counting will likely prevent me as commissioner from doing my job, which is to certify to the accuracy of election numbers,” Martin told the state’s Standing Committee on Election Law last October in New York City.
Martin was said to have praised the attempt to provide accessibility to disabled voters, but warned the new computerized systems have too many problems, including a propensity to break down on Electoin Day.
She stated, at the time, “if Columbia County starts using software to count votes, I will not certify an election unless an appropriately designed audit of the paper ballots is conducted.”
State EI advocates have informed The BRAD BLOG that Columbia plans to lock all scanned paper ballots in a county jail cell before performing a 100% hand count of all races on the day following Election Day in order “to avoid relying on the software.”
The Dominion/Sequoia systems being used across the state today were first partially deployed in the state last November during the hotly contested Special Election for the U.S. House in NY’s 23rd Congressional District. In that election — which we covered in some detail for Upstate NY’s right-leaning Gouverneur Times (see here and here) — Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman reportedly lost in a very close race to the Democratic candidate Bill Owen. The Dominion/Sequoia op-scan systems failed in a number of precincts across several counties during that election, which Hoffman made the mistake of conceding far too early, leaving thousands of paper ballots uncounted by any human being.
Without bothering to count ballots by hand, optical-scan machines can be maliciously programmed to flip election results without detection, as demonstrated in the stunning finale of HBO’s Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch that hack here as it occurred live in Leon County, Florida on a Diebold/Premier optical scan system. Dominion purchased both Diebold/Premier and Sequoia earlier this year, making the Canadian firm one of the largest e-voting companies in the nation along with their top competitor, the oft-failed ES&S whose systems are being used for the first time today in New York City.
CORRECTION: We had originally indicated that the new voting systems in New York City were made by Dominion/Sequoia. Those systems are made by ES&S. The article above has been corrected to that end.
UPDATE: NY news site “Politics on the Hudson” reports on problems with some of the Dominion/Sequoia ImageCast op-scanners in Westchester County, including the ones used by Bill O’Reilly’s wife. In a follow-up item they note “After reports of faulty voting machines in New York City and the rest of the state today, [State] Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli offered to look into the problem.”
Wall Street Journal has many more details on the mess in New York City.
ComputerWorld has more on probs in NYC as well as Westchester and Nassau Counties.
Hrm… perhaps you’re not big on verification of data (what blogger is), but Brooklyn is not a Dominion account…
[Ed Note: Thanks for the correction. I’ve corrected my original misstatement and noted the change transparently. Too bad folks like NYT don’t do same when errors are pointed out to them (but what corporate mainstream media outfit does?) – BF]
Nice, shiny, and new is not always better. True story.
Great article but Dominion didn’t supply the machines to NY City, it was the US based Elections Systems and Software that won that contract!
Joe
So it happens again… Same story different place!
Joe you’re words fall on ignorant ears! Much like Fox new, this site rarely let’s facts stand in the way of a nice sensational headline.
I also didn’t see any citations or links to the original source material, another common affliction of the yellow journalism fodder of the day i.e. “Blogs.” I tracked down the times article and it only mentions “failures” in city Boroughs- nothing mentioning “statewide,” and as already pointed out, the City contract was awarded to ES&S. Are there issues with deployed voting machines? Decidedly yes, but lying and misrepresentation, especially willfull or thaty due to pure laziness and ineptitude, doesn’t help anything.
I long for the days of respectable journalism rather than hack bullshit more concerned with adhering to a preconceived agenda than facts.
I voted today and discussed with the ladies at the desk for my district that the vote was now unverifiable – we all agreed. New York State is now in lock step with the rest of the dumbed-down country.
The whole damn system is a System Error
Brad has no idea of the impracticality of handcounting all those ballots. But New York does need a good audit provision to hand count a statistically meaningful number of the ballots to assure that the machines didn’t make significant errors that could overturn an election.
I smell a lot of rats, and they ain’t just the ones down in the NYC subways.
Joe @3 wrote:
Am I missing something here? The article contains the following:
If you want to understand the quality of NY’s “new” voting system, check out Dan Rather’s investigation of the company’s sweatshop where the idea of quality control was to hold up a machine and shake it. If nothing rattles around, it passes the test.
Oh, Paul Stokes. Hand counting is not all that difficult; not even in NYC. How many people cast ballots in your precinct? How many people would you need to sit down and publicly count them?
Paul Stokes @ 8 said:
How is it impractical? How many ballots are cast on average at each precinct? And what is your evidence that counting at each one would be impractical?
Intelligent @ 5 said:
What facts are inaccurate, Intel?
What links to what original source material are missing? Or are you just making stuff up under guise of pseudonym, while I put my actual name on everything I do?
Feel free to let me know what you need a source link for, and I’ll do my best to offer it, if it’s not already in the article. Thanks!
Still no link to your “Times” reference. Disingenuous at best. So, I see you updated the original to correct the false assertion that NYC was voting on Dominion equipment. But I still can’t help but wonder why you didn’t feel the need to do even rudimentary fact checking before posting. And, based on the Times article I found which I’m pretty sure was the article you ripped off for the post (I can’t be sure because you offered no proper citation or link), the Times autyhor’s never stated a Vendor name… So you filled that in on your own- that’s called bias.
It’s in there. It’s a hotlink, Jack-ass.
Intelligent disingenuously wrote @ 13:
What the hell are you talking about?! The link to the Times story, which is quoted and referenced liberally throughout the article above, is, and has been since first publication, linked in the very first paragraph of the article!
You’ll note when an error was pointed out to me in the first version of the article yesterday, I corrected it swiftly and transparently. That’s what actual journalists do. Helps them from looking like a jackass. What’s your excuse?
Don’t got one? That’s called bias. And jackassery.
For the record, if what you’re suggestion is that I’m somehow “biased” in favor of ES&S over Dominion/Sequioa, well you obviously haven’t a clue of my years of work here. Or you’re just biased in favor of the Canadian-based, Chavez-tied profiteers and democracy blood-suckers of Dominion/Sequioa. Or you’re a jackass.
Other than that, thank you for reading The BRAD BLOG.
The
article in Bloomberg
has this quote by NYC Public Advocate Bill de Blasio
This was predicted back in March of 2006 by Howard Stanislevic (a New Yorker no less)
Failure by Design? and supported by empirical evidence Vort Trust USA, Howard, and VotersUnite.org
One of Howard’s particular concerns is that since the mean time between failure is so low (the machines are so unreliable) and the unreliability is so variable, that it is possible to skew an election by putting the more reliable machines in one location and the less reliable machines in others. Using the repair and problem reports from past elections it becomes possible to skew the results of future elections by malicious deployment of machines based on reliability.
The point those is that this was forseeable and forseable SIX years ago
100% hand count sounds like a good idea, whether or not the scanner is counting ballots.
Intelligent… like every other critic of Brad Blog, you don’t respond to the issues raised in the article, accuse Brad of having a political agenda, nitpick on trivial (and swiftly, openly corrected) mistakes, make false assertions, and generally just have no f*cking clue what you’re talking about. Comparing Brad Blog to Fox ‘News’ is laughably absurd. Apparently you wouldn’t recognize real journalism if it smacked you upside the head.
Check this out
Are New York’s Voting Machines Secure?
The NYT article seems to have changed quite a bit from the time when the quotations were taken. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, or that you’re making them up, but the commenter might not have recognized the NYT story linked at the top?
Anyway, these problems were completely foreseeable. I think that the only reason not to perform a hand count to substantiate the computer’s tabulation is to hide from the public the true unreliability of these machines in producing an accurate count.
We Oregonians don’t have election problems with vote by mail
Bob Maginnis said:
Um, that you know of. See this:
Why ‘Vote-by-Mail’ Elections are a Terrible Idea for Democracy
For those curious about what a verifiable election looks like there is this:
New Hampshire Town Citizens Prohibit Concealed Vote Counting by Computers or Any Other Method
Heh, I knew I recognized Paul Stokes’ name from my time in New Mexico. He was referenced to me on occasions when I met with the Bernalillo County Clerk to provide strong evidence that the Wilson/Madrid race had serious problems and should be audited. It never was. Stokes is the secretary(?) of the United Voters of New Mexico, and he pressed hard to get DRE’s replaced with optical scan machines, but bought into the lie that an optical scan producing a paper slip for the voter to walk away with was somehow akin to a verifiable vote.
Paul, I know you mean well, but you’ve got to stop clinging to unreality. By the way, were the NM County Clerks ever forced to follow through with those bogus mandatory maintenance contracts? How was that for an outright taxpayer ripoff – and you worry about the impracticality of a hand count. Don’t get me wrong, Bernalillo County developed some very stringent tiered audit procedures (good job Maggie, considering there was simply nothing else in place prior), but it still doesn’t negate the fact that none of the votes are truly verifiable, regardless of whether auditing is triggered. New Mexico spent 18 million dollars on ES&S M100s throughout the state…and you’re telling me that running an all-paper ballot hand-count fully verifiable operation wouldn’t be cheaper? (And no, I’m not just talking about the cost to democracy.)
It’s the machine counting paper or paperless ballots that’s the problem. Diebold has been preempted from operating in California because of their manipulations.
Re: those recent Tea Party Primary-Election wins, Too amazing to believe? Look at who’s counting the ballots!
Delaware has Sequoia & New York has ES&S, both in the same Honesty League with Diebold, or “Premier Voting Solutions” (changed their name in hopes of dodging infamy).
Want an eye-full? got to VotersUnite.org’s stat page (link is below) where you can check voting machine errors by state, vendor, date or problem.
Voters Unite, Election Problems
According to their reports, in New Castle County, Delaware, in November of 2000, there were 3.6% blank votes for president, on their paperless voting machines. (Thank you, Sequoia). In my own state, where the popular incumbent Sen. Patti Murray will be challenged this year, VotersUnite reports valid ballots were rejected in King and Pierce Counties in September, 2004; thanks there goes to the poorly designed Diebold and ES&S software revisions.
Janette –
These dipshit politicians inevitably end up cutting their own throats. We had the opportunity to change the election scenery in WA back in 2004 at the state level with Andy Stephenson and Laura Ruderman, but Sam Reed is such a “popular and bipartisan” SoS that the Democratic establishment would barely give them the time of day, let alone any financial support to make a serious challenge to Reed (GOP.) It was all they could do to get the DREs removed from Snohomish County (and now we are all mail-in…problem NOT solved!) No, I don’t feel sorry for Murray, or Cantwell, or Gregoire when it comes to tight races…all the bullshit with the last Governor’s race could have been avoided with paper ballots, but apparently they’d rather take office under a cloud of suspicion. I don’t get it. It could be handled at a state OR federal level, and it’s not like they don’t have the information/evidence available, any of them, to draft legislation to preserve the people’s democracy by banning the use of opti-scan, DRE, make election day on a Saturday…they don’t have the will, they have other priorities. Well screw them, every last one of them. Part of me totally hopes Rossi wins (not that he’ll get my vote), drives this state completely into the ground, then perhaps people will wake up.
None of these issues will be resolved until the electorate is willing to “throw itself upon the machine”, are willing to face prosecution for the DESTRUCTION of these damnable machines. Until voters realize that the only solution is to destroy these machines on election day, shoulder the consequences and ensure a forfeit of the election; those who rule us with no trouble at all will continue to show their contempt for us.
Why are Chase and Bank of America able to offer depositors facsimile copies of checks they deposit in ATMs immediately so that they have a record of their financial transaction before leaving the bank and voters can’t get the same thing?
Obviously voting isn’t meant to make a difference, it’s just another diversion.
Matt Carmody asked:
Because we have a secret ballot in the U.S., and if voters were allowed to leave the polls with a receipt showing how they voted they’d be able to buy and/or sell such votes. No voter should ever be allowed to leave the polling place with a record of how they voted.