August 5, 2004
Assemblyman
Sheldon Silver
Speaker,
New York State Assembly
LOB
932
Albany,
NY 12248
Dear Assemblyman Silver
We are concerned with the
legal standards that New York State may set for new voting machines. We
appreciate Assemblyman Keith Wright's excellent bill passed by the Assembly,
A-8847-A.
We would prefer to vote on
paper ballots that can be counted by hand or optical scanner. Everyone
understands the security problems associated with paper ballots, and our Boards
of Election know how to handle them.
Very
few people understand how to guard the security of computers. We believe that
our county and state Boards of Election will NOT have the resources and staff
to prepare for the use of secure electronic voting systems in the foreseeable
future. We believe it is best to avoid the use of electronic voting systems
because their use will require privatization of elections and the use of
unobservable procedures, thus inviting and concealing election fraud.
Before New York spends any
money at all on computerized voting equipment, or uses computers to record and
count our votes, we would like to see these protections in law:
1.
All software and other programming used in electronic voting and ballot
tabulating equipment, as well as all certification reports from Independent
Testing Authorities, must be posted on our state Board of Elections website so
that the public can view them. It is
inappropriate in a democracy for the state to force voters to use secret
unobservable procedures for elections-- so at least we should be able to read
the software and certification reports.
2. Requiring a voter-verified
paper audit trail is an essential first step, but New York must also treat
these voter-verified paper ballots as the ballots of record to be counted (and
recounted as needed). Electronic ballots
and tallies may be used to conduct a professional quality end-of-election-day
ballot reconciliation procedure, such as proposed by the Open Voting
Consortium, to verify the tallies of paper ballots and as a mechanism to detect
ballot box stuffing, theft of ballots, or computer errors. We do not believe
that electronic ballots and tallies, and a random recount of a small percentage
of paper ballots, is trustworthy.
3.
Ban wireless communication devices in vote recording and tabulating equipment.
Respectfully yours,
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