Guest Blogged by Bo Lipari of New Yorkers for Verified Voting
The following was posted to my Blog on June 22, 2007
I’m pleased to report that due to a huge outpouring of calls from citizens, and three intense days and nights working the Capitol halls by New Yorkers for Verified Voting and the League of Women Voters/NY, New York State’s voting machine laws were not weakened or tampered with in any way. Neither the Microsoft amendment nor any other proposals being pushed by voting machine vendor lobbyists made it into any of the thousands of bills passed in this last crazy week of the session. The citizens of New York State stood up to these powerful private interests and won.
A rapid response by citizens to this threat to our essential protections resulted in over 3,000 calls to legislators in just over two days. This huge outpouring from the public averted the threat of a stealth amendment slipping into law unnoticed, as so often happens in this last hectic week in Albany. Every legislator I talked to over the last three days was impressed by the volume of calls and the passionate reaction, and promised they would watch the bills carefully for back door changes, adding their eyes to ours. They reaffirmed their commitment to keeping New York’s voting machine laws among the strongest in the nation, and in the end, they came through. The public’s response to this threat has kept our representatives vigilant and committed to keeping New York State’s voting machine laws among the strongest in the nation.
Keeping our strict laws intact was an essential win for us, but this is only Round One. The next battleground will be the New York State Board of Elections, where the four commissioners are discussing how to interpret the New York State law. And yes, you guessed it, one of the interpretations being promoted by some of these decision makers would allow the voting machine vendors to use Microsoft and other source code in voting technology that would not be subject to review in the event of election problems. Our next task will be to make sure the State Board of Elections understands what we’ve told the State Legislature, that the public’s will is expressed precisely in the letter of our election law ““ ALL source code must be handed over, not just some pieces of it. Our elections, and the technologies we use to conduct them, belong to us. And we the people aim to keep it that way.
But today, let’s celebrate. Congratulations friends, we did it!
So how do we take what the people in NY have done, and get the same result in CA? There are those who say that Debra Bowen will never get her hands on the source code. Are those people correct?
My bet is that those people are wrong. California is in good hands with Debra Bowen. She’s a scrapper. Not your usual cowardly Democrat. Debra Bowen will prevail.
Thank YOU, Bradblog! I rarely have made an effort to talk to my local State Legislator about a bill. But because I was prepared, thanks to your efforts, I emailed him- and copied it to a bunch of strategically active friends- and coincidentally ran into him the evening before the week started- a rare but timely moment. A Republican, he’s just as disgusted with the idea of electronic machines as we are. He’s been in office a long time and sees nothing wrong with continuing to fund the repair/overhaul and training for the current “old-fashioned” machines which has been pulled to help pay for the new machines. He’s also aware that electronic machines will cost the taxpayers much more money as long as they exist. On the other hand my State Senator sponsored a bill, in this busy week, to lower taxes on gambling concerns so they could pay for “marketing”- ugh.
Good. But if they used Linux as the OS it would all be open source anyway. The only way is open source code in public voting machines.
If the software can be altered after it’s in a machine, then it doesn’t matter that much whether we can see it pre-installation. What we have to do is avoid having black-box software we haven’t seen (and Lord knows all the different voting machines have a lot of different pieces of software in them) and a DRE which could have anything in it.
We could use a machine to let a voter select a candidate and mark it on a ballot in nice neat readable ink. But, make that the official ballot, not just an audit trail.
Skip the DREs where evil-doers could hide the results of their computer manipulations!
Even optical scanners have to be considered warily. If you have the ballots you would still have to do audit checks or the computerized scanners could tally up the numbers just as phonily as the DREs.
Transparency is key.