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Voting machine problems cause concern in N.Y.
Federal mandate remains unmet
BY VALERIE BAUMAN The Associated Press

    Cliff Perez is legally blind and would like to vote without help this fall. Instead, he will count on his wife’s assistance with New York’s ancient pull lever machines, rather than rely on brand new $12,000 voting machines designed to give independence to the disabled.
    “We’re heading in the right direction, but I think for this election, there might be some problems,” said Perez, a systems advocate for the Independent Living Center of the Hudson Valley Inc., in Troy.
    Even some election officials are worried.
    New York has spent millions of federal dollars on the new ballot marking machines for the disabled to comply with federal laws. With little more than a week before primary state elections, many have watched machines fail to turn on, freeze up or automatically store paper ballots in metal containers vulnerable to tampering.
    Nassau County machines had various problems, including faulty monitors, diagnostic systems and batteries. Some machines also had a large gap between where the ballot was marked and the metal box it was dropped in, said William Biamonte, the Democratic commissioner of the Nassau County Board of Elections.
    “Someone could actually stuff the ballot box — which is a problem,” he said. “If the machine says 10 people voted and we open it up and there’s 20 ballots, how do we know which are the real ballots?”
    Bob Brehm, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections, said the vendors have been responding to the counties’ problems — sealing off gaps in ballot boxes, resolving technical issues and training workers to handle the machines.
    “We are ready to roll them out in every polling place around the state,” Brehm said.
    The biggest concern is whether faulty machines could result in inaccurate vote counts.
    “They’re skittish machines,” Biamonte said.
    “It’s scary b e c a u s e we don’t k n o w what will happen on polling day.”
    Disability and voting rights advocates and other county election offi - cials are not impressed either, even though many machines have been repaired. For the fall 2008 elections — the Sept. 9 primary and general presidential runoffs — New York must have at least one new ballot marker in each polling place that can accommodate the disabled.
    It’s a requirement of the Help America Vote Act. New York is years behind federal deadlines to conform with HAVA, enacted to improve voting accuracy and access for the disabled after the contested 2000 presidential election.
    By the fall of 2009, New York must replace every old-fashioned pull lever voting machine in the state with new HAVA compliant machines.
    One machine is an optical scan model made by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. of California. Voters mark their ballots by filling in “bubbles,” similar in appearance to standardized tests. In the fall elections, those ballots would likely be counted by hand — scanners will be added next year.
    Biamonte said only about fi ve of Nassau County’s approximately 240 machines for the disabled — at a cost of about $12,000 each — aren’t working.
    But he’s still nervous. Of the fi rst 44 machines sent to Nassau County in May, four were rejected for
failure and 23 had “signifi cant problems.”
    Some of those problems were paper jams, which were resolved when a different type of paper ballot was used.

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One machine is an optical scan model made by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. of California.

Quoted from JosephSalamone

This is a disaster waiting to happen...

Quoted from senders

How in heck did we get this far???? we get what we get....we make an honest effort to vote with a system and the rest if up to God....always has been

Quoted from bumblethru

that's just it though senders, some people think that they ARE God!