NYS Faces Court Order For New HAVA Voting Machines
BY RICHARD GENTILVISO

Photo americanhistory.si.edu This voting machine was patented by inventor Alfred J. Gillespie and manufactured by the Standard Voting Machine Company of Rochester, New York, in the late 1890s.

The New York Primary Election for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will be held on Feb. 5, 2008, one month earlier than in previous presidential election years.

"By moving the primary date to February, we will help secure New York's large and diverse population an influential voice in selecting the 2008 presidential nominees," Governor Eliot Spitzer said last April.

But compliance, or rather lack of compliance, with Federal HAVA (Help American Vote Act) requirements may force New York to move up more than just a date on a calendar.

A December 20 hearing, scheduled before Judge Gary Sharpe in federal court, will determine whether New York has to comply with HAVA mandates requiring up-to-date, handicap accessible voting machines throughout every polling place in the state for the February presidential primary.

"We don't think we can meet that," said Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections in a November 26 Associated Press [AP] report. "That will be something the judge will have to decide."

In May, Douglas A. Kellner, co-chairman of the Board of Elections, said the old voting machines could be replaced by September 2008, in time for the November '08 presidential election. But that was based on certification of new electronic voting machines by December 2007. A critical obstacle has been uncertainty about the security and reliability of the new machines and conflicts of interest concerning the testing company that certifies them.

The Board of Elections suspended the testing company's working on certification of new voting machines last January after finding the company did not follow appropriate quality control procedures or conduct all proper tests.

New York is the only state in the country that has not complied with the 2002 HAVA Law, enacted in the aftermath of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election. HAVA requires upgrades of voting systems from old punch-card and pulllever systems.

After numerous previous promises to comply passed, the U.S. Department of Justice sued New York in March 2006. The pull-lever voting machines New York has used for decades don't meet various HAVA guidelines because they aren't accessible to the [visually] disabled, don't leave permanent paper records and don't permit voters to check their votes for accuracy.

"Continued foot dragging in New York state is, in our opinion, an outrage," said Susan Dooha, executive director of the non-profit The Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York in the November 26 AP report.

But David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a May 8, 2007 New York Times report, "The federal certification process has approved [new] systems that have lost thousands of votes and systems with serious security vulnerabilities."

In February 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced plans to dump touch-screen machines that many state counties had installed as state-of-the-art after the 2000 vote in Florida. Paper votes counted by optical scanners will be used instead, costing the state $32.5 million.

New York has been considering bids for both touch-screen systems with printers and optical scanners from five companies. New York has submitted two different plans to the court as to how and when it could meet federal HAVA mandates.

"I believe that New York was correctly cautious about converting their lever machines to electronic ones," said Congressmember William Lacy Clay, Jr., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives in the May 7 Times report. "For them to have waited and to have made sure everything is in place is a good thing."