NY State Assembly Hearing on election law & voting equipment,
conducted by:
Committee on Election Law, Assemblywoman Joan L. Millman, Chair
Committee on Education, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, Chair
Committee on Libraries & Education Technology, Assemblywoman
Barbara Lifton, Chair
October 22, 2009, New York, New York
Allegra Dengler, Chair, Citizens for Voting Integrity, Dobbs Ferry,
New York
Thank you for this opportunity to be heard.
After decades of generally trusted and
reasonably tamperproof elections in New York run on mechanical lever voting
machines, this transition to a new voting system based on paper ballots and
scanners carries much risk. The threats to our elections posed by this
new voting system must be taken seriously.
New York State must fund all of the increased
costs of training, administration, security, audits and equipment. Local
governments in this troubled fiscal climate will not on their own be able to
adequately fund replacing the current functional voting system. Local
governments are cutting police. They are cutting recreation. If
adequate funding from New York State is not available, New York should not
replace the current functional voting system at this time.
Security costs money
Without adequate funding for training, security
and audits, we will have years of unverifiable and at-risk elections. State of
the art security must be funded equal to or better than that employed by our
financial institutions for our money, including measures such as security
cameras to protect paper ballots and scanner cards in storage.
There are two vulnerable areas, the
vote-counting scanners and the paper ballots themselves. Either is
susceptible to vote stealing and fraud.
1.
Security for the paper ballots
In the case
of paper ballots, the problems are well documented, including practices such as
ballot box stuffing, misplacement, substitution, destruction or invalidation of
ballots.
2. Security
for the vote-counting scanners
The problems of computerized vote-counting are similarly well-documented. Study
after study shows what Princeton found in 2006 in their Security Analysis
of the Diebold AccuVote Scanner. The study can be found at itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf
The Princeton University Center for Information
Technology Policy and Dept. of Computer Science, found that:
... an attacker who gets physical access to a machine
or its removable memory card for as little
as one minute could install malicious code; malicious
code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent
with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads
automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a
voting-machine virus.
Adequate audits are essential to verify that
the scanners are counting accurately
Adequate audits are expensive. A hand count of a statistically
significant percentage of the votes cast in the precinct on election night,
before the ballots are moved out of sight of observers, is necessary. It
will be expensive and time-consuming and New York State must provide
adequate training and funding.
September 2009 Primary Election observations
I observed the voting equipment in four
pollsites in Westchester County during the primary. They were set up for
use by people with special needs. None were used. Here are my
observations:
1. The sturdiness and security need to be
improved. On two of the machines, the door on the side was dented. In one
case it was dented enough to allow access.
2. On one of the four machines, there was no security tape on the ballot box
access door as required.
New York must not use the new voting system in
2010 if any of these three conditions exist:
1. If the scanners do not pass
certification to New York’s standards.
2. If New York State does not completely
support the counties with funding to cover all of their increased costs,
especially statistically adequate audits.
3. If the voting machine vendor is found
at any time to be in violation of New York State Finance Law (SFL) sec 163, and
the New York State Comptroller's Procurement and Disbursement Guidelines.
To date, most of the large voting machine
vendors have failed to meet the standards in this law. Attached is the first
section of the VotersUnite report “Vendors are Undermining the Structure of
U.S. Elections”. The full report with case studies is available online at
http://www.votersunite.org/info/ReclaimElectionsSumm.asp
Conclusion
Given the known vulnerabilities and costs of
both paper ballots and electronic vote-counting, I urge the State legislature
in these fiscally uncertain times to amend the New York State ERMA law to allow
counties to retain lever voting machines.
The federal HAVA law appears not to ban lever voting machines, but to ensure
that there is no costly litigation, I urge the State legislature to
convince New York’s Congressional delegation to clarify federal law by
granting an exemption for New York State to keep lever voting machines.
Attachments:
Voters Unite report “Vendors are
Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections”. Pages 1-8, August 18, 2008.
http://www.votersunite.org/info/ReclaimElectionsSumm.asp
GAO September 2005 Report ELECTIONS Federal Efforts to Improve Security
and Reliability Executive Summary www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-956.