http://www.wheresthepaper.org/DraftResPBOS.htm
Nov 3, 2005
By Council Members ____list____
Whereas, Honest, observable, and easily-verified public elections provide the foundation for our representative democracy and public confidence in our election system; and
Whereas, New York State’s new Election Reform and Modernization Act requires the Board of Elections in the City of New York to acquire a new voting technology to replace our mechanical lever machines, and allows us to choose between paper ballots with precinct-based optical scanners and accessible ballot-marking devices, or direct recording electronic voting systems; and
Whereas, The Board of Elections of the City of New York must select and begin planning immediately to make the transition to the use of a new voting technology; and
Whereas, Voter and public confidence would be strengthened by the use of paper ballots, which are marked directly by voters, as easily as a lottery ticket, whether manually by a pen or by use of accessible ballot-marking devices by voters with disabilities or minority languages; and
Whereas, Paper ballots can be securely stored and handled, and enable election observers to meaningfully witness election procedures and vote-counting and thereby detect, prevent, and correct errors or tampering; and
Whereas, Paper ballots facilitate easy and observable recounts; and
Whereas, Optical scanners in the polling site would detect errors in ballot-marking such as overvotes, undervotes, and stray marks, and enable voters to correct such errors before their ballot is cast; and
Whereas, Optical scanners have proven their reliability by being successfully used in elections nationwide for over thirty years and are currently in use in 46% of American jurisdictions by 35% of American voters; and
Whereas, Optical scanners have been successfully programmed, operated, and maintained by public employees in New York State in agencies such as the Division of the Lottery, the New York State Education Department and the Department of Motor Vehicles, as well as by our county Boards of Election in all boroughs of the City of New York for use in counting absentee ballots; and
Whereas, It is in the public interest that public employees perform all work related to the conduct of elections, and optical scanners can be easily programmed by bipartisan technical public employee staff at our county Boards of Elections without outside assistance, thus maintaining public control of elections and avoiding the expense of technical assistance from vendors; and
Whereas, Electronic voting systems would privatize the public functions of handling and counting votes, and due to the use of secret software in such systems only vendors would fully know and understand what their electronic voting systems were doing, and the Board of Elections would be unable to uphold their responsibility to conduct elections; and
Whereas, Paper ballots with precinct-based optical scanners and accessible ballot-marking devices would provide the more cost-effective new voting technology for the City of New York due to its significantly lower costs in consideration of how many units would be required and initial purchase costs; transition costs of altering storage facilities, revision of training materials and procedures, and training of voters and poll-workers; continuing costs of storage, transportation, logic and accuracy testing, and dealing with lawsuits of the type that electronic voting has engendered in other jurisdictions; replacement costs since optical scanner equipment is less delicate than electronic voting equipment and has a longer lifespan; and vendor technical assistance; and
Whereas, Paper ballots, precinct-based optical scanners, and accessible ballot-marking devices can provide the advantages of quick election-day results and accessibility without the risks associated with electronic voting; and
Whereas, Voter and public confidence would be lowered by the use of electronic ballots which no voter or observer can witness, and electronic vote counts which no observer would be able to meaningfully observe; and
Whereas, Electronic voting systems make errors and tampering difficult if not impossible to detect, prevent, or correct; and
Whereas, Computer security is difficult or impossible to achieve, as exemplified by the 40 million Mastercard accounts compromised in June, 2005, break-ins to computers used by the United States Department of Defense, and other well-known problems with computer security; and
Whereas, The vast majority of computer systems have errors even after years of daily use and correction of software, but electronic voting systems have never gone through this process of auditing and software correction, and no election conducted with electronic voting systems has ever been fully audited; and
Whereas, The use of communications capability in electronic voting systems would be impossible to control and would open the electronic ballot box to tampering by anyone in the world; and
Whereas; Other jurisdictions have experienced severe problems with electronic voting systems which have reduced voter confidence, engendered public cynicism about elections and the legitimacy of our representative government, and prompted lawsuits by candidates and voters as a result of the many irregularities experienced with such systems; and
Whereas, Even if the Board of Elections of the City of New York selects electronic voting systems as New York City’s new voting technology, we will also need to acquire accessible ballot-marking devices for use in each polling place in order to assist voters with disabilities and minority languages to mark emergency and provisional ballots; and because no other devices at this time provide the same high degree of accessibility; and because electronic voting systems alone will not be sufficient to comply with state and federal requirements for assisting voters with disabilities and minority languages; now, therefore, be it