Count the ways state is dysfunctional
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By RICHARD KIRSCH
Opinion????? Times Union??? Friday, May 6, 2005 ?
Before the governor and Legislature go too far in crowing about an on-time budget removing the "most dysfunctional" label, they should hold on. Proof positive: New York is the only state in the nation that hasn't put in place a plan to reform its way of counting votes, implementing a new federal law that was enacted following the 2000 presidential vote counting disaster in Florida. If that's not dysfunctional, what is?

It's not like vote counting problems don't exist in New York. Just last fall, a controversy over which votes to count in a state Senate race in Westchester County dragged on through the courts for four months.

After the election results were certified, with the incumbent winning by 18 votes, a bag of 24 lost votes were found! After the presidential vote counting disaster in Florida in 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, known as HAVA. HAVA provides funds for states to purchase new voting equipment and established some other basic requirements, such as establishing a statewide voter file, providing access to voting machines by the disabled, establishing voter identification rules and allowing people to cast a provisional vote if their registration is challenged. If New York fails to implement HAVA by June, the state will lose both $153 million in federal funds to pay for new machines and any chance of implementing reforms by the 2006 election.

This month the Assembly and Senate agreed on some provisions of HAVA, including a statewide voter list. But the two bodies remain apart on the key issue of voting machines and the role of the state and county board of elections in deciding on what kind of machine New Yorkers will use to cast their ballots.

The good news is that both the Senate and Assembly would require that new machines have a paper ballot that voters can verify. This is the most important single reform, safeguarding against computer voting in which there is no way to know if the computer recorded votes correctly and no way to count ballots in a disputed election.

The bad news is that both houses of the Legislature would leave the choice of what kind of machine to buy to either the state or county board of elections. Election commissioners will have to decide between two kinds of machines, computer voting terminals (like ATMs) and optical scanners. The League of Women Voters, many editorial boards and my organization, Citizen Action, have endorsed optical scanning machines. They are the better choice because they are much less prone to computer vote theft and because voters mark a paper ballot, which is easy to read and verify. Computer voting machines print out a flimsy receipt, like that at a bank ATM. Optical scanners are also less expensive to purchase and maintain than computer voting machines, which means that there will be more machines available to voters and shorter lines at the polls. The lower cost will also put less strain on county taxpayers who will have to pay for maintaining the machines.

It doesn't make sense to leave this important choice to the state or county boards of elections. The state Board of Elections is notorious for being a paper tiger, failing to enforce even New York's woefully weak campaign finance laws. The board is in worst shape than usual, caught in an 18-month-long partisan dispute over its staffing. Leaving it to 58 county boards of elections will mean all sorts of different voting machines across New York. Voters in some parts of the state will have more reliable voting machines than others. New Yorkers who move elsewhere in the state will have to learn about a new machine, creating another barrier to voting. It will be impossible to conduct a statewide campaign to educate voters on how to use the new voting machines.

And there's one more really big problem with leaving the choice to state or county boards of elections: money. Voting machine manufacturers are lobbying hard for computer machines, because selling them is much more profitable. County election commissioners will be besieged by lobbyists for the voting machine companies pushing for the computers instead of the optical scanners. County taxpayers will end up paying more to wait on longer lines and worry whether their votes will be counted correctly. The focus of the Brennan Center's report that labeled New York most dysfunctional was on the Legislature's lack of internal democracy. But the consequences of dysfunction on how our votes are counted when we go to the polls is even more profound, striking at our most basic democratic process, voting. It's too late for the governor and Legislature in New York to avoid coming in last on this one. But it's not too late to hope they get it right.