Member calls for changing proposed election regs
Electronic voting seen as dagger in the heart of democracy
By SHERRY HALBROOK
William Sell, the PEF delegate who proposed the successful resolution on voting machines at the union’s 2005 convention in September, took that resolution and his concerns to a public hearing of the state Board of Elections (BOE) in December.
Sell, a research analyst for Higher Educational Services at the state Education Department in Albany, was critical of the board’s draft voting machine regulations and urged the state election commissioners to protect the accuracy of vote counting and reporting by keeping it in the hands of people directly accountable to the public, rather than handing it over to corporations or other private interests.
“New York is in danger of outsourcing its democracy,” Sell warned.
“Why are we allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, to handle our votes?” he demanded.
Sell warned the state’s hasty last-minute efforts to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) would put vote counting and reporting into the hands of the voting machine hardware and software manufacturers if the state allows the use of electronic voting machines.
“The board puts far too much faith in the vendors and does little, if anything, to allay the public’s fear of electronic voting’s many documented flaws. This lack of action implies that we blindly trust the vendors,” Sell said.
He recommended an optically scanned paper-ballot system as a much safer and more responsible choice.
“The solution to all of the concerns and all the horror stories regarding electronic voting is simple,” Sell said. “Rely on a mature, reliable verifiable technology totally open to public scrutiny. A publicly administered paper-ballot and optical-scan voting system is such a system.”
Sell said these systems have been successfully used in elections nationwide for more than 30 years and “many states have decided to turn to these reliable and mature systems as their only statewide voting system.”
Nevertheless, the BOE’s proposed voting machine regulations favor electronic voting systems over the optically scanned paper ballots.
“At a time when both voter confidence in new voting technologies is eroding and when America continues to be shocked by corporate scandal after corporate scandal, government simply cannot allow the counting of our votes to be outsourced to private corporations,” Sell stated.
The fair and accurate counting and reporting of votes, he said, is the very cornerstone of democracy in the U.S. and “must be absolutely free of the appearance of impropriety. The only way to avoid the appearance of impropriety, especially where state contacts are concerned, is by using a transparent, public process with full disclosure. We have not seen such a process here.
“I propose that the regulations be changed to provide for a paper ballot optical scan system under full public ownership of all machines, source code and documentation and with all the responsibility for testing, maintenance and operation entrusted to civil servants.
“We need to protect the vote,” Sell insisted. “No private-sector employees should be anywhere near a voting machine in New York state once these machines have been delivered and training has been completed.”
The
Communicator February 2006
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