Voting machines: Lifton right on choice

Opinion    Ithaca Journal    09 November 2005

As most voters know, Tuesday's visit to those old lever voting machines was, for most people, the last. The troubling question now becomes - what next?

If you remember back to 2000, there was that little fuss over counting votes in Florida. Congress, which in the end got to watch while the Supreme Court settled the issue, decided such a thing shouldn't happen again. Federal lawmakers set aside a bundle of cash, and ordered all states to overhaul voting machines to make sure they meet a host of new standards. The new machine had to be in place by 2006, giving them a dry run in a federal election before facing the crush and controversy of the 2008 presidential race.

   
By this spring, every state but one had acted.

With time running out for the state to get about $200 million in federal money to get the job done, a special legislative panel in Albany decided in May to let the counties decide. The options: more expensive ATM-style electronic machines, called ?direct recording electronic? or DREs, or less expensive but paper-hungry optical scanners.

But now the options may be running out.

Local Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, Speaker Shelly Silver's appointee to a 10-member advisory panel looking over voting modernization, is raising an alarm as the deadline for local action approaches. While Albany lawmakers passed a law in June backing choice for counties, local officials still have to pick from a list of state certified machines. Lifton, whose panel met for the first time Oct. 20, said she fears the machine manufacturers who each make both electronic and optical devices might only submit the more expensive DREs for certification by the state Board of Election. Counties would be left with the freedom to choose from a single option.

From the start an advocate of the paper-based optical scanner machines, Lifton says cutting off local discretion sidesteps the law and cheats New York voters and taxpayers.

Lifton was right about optical scanner, and she's right again.

New York missed the boat when it didn't optical scanning machines throughout the state, a decision made under more than $1 million in pro-DRE lobbying from manufacturers. The scanners are cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, have a proven record in many parts of the country and, perhaps most importantly, leave an unrivaled paper trail of every voters choices should tight races require a careful second tally. Lifton, like-minded legislators and vocal good government groups won a victory when they fought for local choice, and that victory cannot be allowed to be erased by the cunning of corporations sensing a fatter deal.

Lifton has called on the state Board of Elections to require manufacturers to submit the optical scanner machines along with the DREs for certification. She says that's the intent of the law. Some state officials say the Board of Elections doesn't have that power. If it doesn't, state lawmakers do, and they should get together and order companies and the BOE to provide local options, which is what legislators clearly intended back in June.

Beyond local choice and $200 or so in federal money, there is something else at stake here - the credibility of government and the electoral process. If corporations who poured $1 million plus can use inaction to trump the lawmakers they couldn't buy - and decide how we will vote for a generation in the process - then more than a few political cynics will have had their worst suspicions realized, and more than a few new ones will be born.