If the Machine is Broken, Fix It

By any count, nearly 1,350 City voters voted for incumbent Councilor At Large Chip Capraro on Election Day. With results still unofficial and still uncertified by the Ontario County Board of Elections, a difference of less than 4/10th of one percent separates Capraro from his opponent. Signed and notarized affidavits from four voters (Sue Kichhausen, Doung Knipple, Kris Whiteleather, Jim DaDaddona) at two polling locations have been filed. They document problems pulling the lever for Capraro on Row A. Machine malfunction is a factor in the outcome of this local race. It’s also been a statewide and national concern.

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the State of New York (read it here) because New York has not complied with an order to replace its lever voting machines. According to the Justice Department filing, the machines need replacing because they are not handicapped accessible and they are not auditable.

Not auditable means there is no way of verifying if a vote attempted to be cast on the machine was actually recorded in the machine tally of all votes. If you were buying a used car and wanted to know how many miles it had been driven, you would want to check the odometer; but if the odometer were known to have been malfunctioning, you’d never know for sure what the actual mileages was— and reading it and re-reading it wouldn’t help.

New Yorkers for Verified Voting, a not-for-profit ballot reform organization with the “goal to ensure that all eligible citizens can vote, and that their votes will be accurately counted,” says lever machines are not reliable and their malfunction is widespread across New York State.

According to Voting Verification board member, William Edelstein, in his article, “New York State Law and Lever Voting Machines,” lever machines frequently malfunction because they are old, improperly maintained, and in need of spare parts that are hard to come by because manufacturers don’t make them. In the City of Geneva, voting machines sit idle in the city garage, along with vehicles and tools, between elections.

Edelstein explains, “With a lever voting machine, the voter flips levers and trusts that the counters corresponding candidates are properly incremented,” but, “there is no way to verify a vote once it is cast; the voter cannot look at the counters and see if the machine has correctly counter their vote. There is no way to audit votes or recount them later."

When it comes to the numbers on a lever voting machine, demanding a recount doesn’t mean very much. All anyone can do is open the machine and keep eyeballing the same numbers on the same counters. For lever machine votes, there is no trail of any kind, such as a hard copy, paper ballot or a receipt of the voting transaction.

Douglas W. Jones says the first lever voting machine was put in service in 1892, in Lockport, New York. The last lever machine was manufactured in 1982. In its day, the lever machine was regarded as an improvement over the paper ballot. There was nothing to “interpret”; the voter’s vote was directly recorded when pulling the lever advanced the counter for their chosen candidate. The booth assured privacy and the secrecy of the ballot.

"Unfortunately,” says Jones, “the mechanism of a lever voting machine maintains no independent record of each voter's ballot. Instead, the only record of a vote is the count maintained on the mechanical register behind each voting lever, where each register has a mechanism comparable to the odometer in a car. Not only is this vulnerable to tampering by the technicians who maintain the machine, but it means that the machine has an immense number of moving parts that are subject to wear and very difficult to completely test."

Testifying before the U.S. Senate on voting system reform, Dan S. Wallach, associate director of ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections) and Rice University professor summarizes a reform minded point of view on ballot reform (read the full transcript here):

It’s important to understand just how much we ask from our voting systems. We certainly want accuracy, both in the ability to correctly record the voter’s intent and in the final tally of the votes. We also want efficiency, in terms of the time it takes a voter to operate the system. We need accessibility, to enable voters from all walks of life. We need tamper-resistance, to defeat attempts to corrupt the election results, whether from within or without. Problems of one sort or another will always occur, so we need recoverability to mitigate against such problems. We need anonymity, so voters may freely express their opinions without fear of bribery or coercion. Most important, we need transparency, such that voters, observers, and the candidates themselves can convince themselves of the correctness of the election outcome.

Jones recommends logic and accuracy testing (L & A testing) before a machine is put in service for any election. In Geneva, the Board of Elections conducts an inspection of the machines, but not a test per se. Malfunctioning machines should be taken out of service and repaired. One person, one vote is the law of the land. We should be able to count on it!