Just announced this morning and reported by The New Jersey Star-Ledger is the news that a state judge has given the state Attorney General eight days to report an alternate means of voting to the state’s 10,000 touch-screen machines.
The ruling undoubtedly comes as an embarrassment to Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has been championing an Election Reform bill in the U.S. House that would allow for the very voting systems the judge in his own state has now disallowed.
New Jersey law requires that all voting machines used in the state must provide a voter verified paper audit trail (vvpat) as of January 1, 2008. A group of voters went to court and questioned whether any vvpat printers could work properly when added to the state’s voting systems. The court agreed to require that the printers be tested.
Testing was accomplished by New Jersey Institute of Technology on printers provided by the voting machine vendors to be used on the state’s Sequoia AVC Advantage, Sequoia AVC Edge, and the Avante Vote-Trakker. All of the test printers failed the state tests.
The test results were provided to the court, which then told the state Attorney General to report back on September 5 with an alternate plan.
Instead of returning with an alternate plan the state told the judge that they had been busy with plans to retest the printers, which would take another six weeks. The judge, however, has instead given the state eight days to return with an alternate solution — not enough time for such a retest. The judge stated, when issuing the order, that “This is a crisis.”
That New Jersey will be disallowing the use of touch-screen voting systems comes at an ironic moment for Congressman Holt as he champions his Election Reform Bill (HR 811) in the U.S. House. Given the judge’s ruling, the touch-screen systems Holt’s bill would allow would now be disallowed in his own home state.
According to the Star-Ledger…
She said computer scientists have offered free software for the scanners.
Why is it that a judge in New Jersey can know that adding a vvpat printer to a touch-screen voting machine is an excercise in pointlessness while some in the Election Integrity community, those supporting Holt’s bill, think it’s a solution to all of our problems?
And all of this is happening right under Holt’s nose. Open your eyes Congressman.
WOW, today’s getting better and better! Thanks John!!
MAy I have permission to post your entire post on DU?
Lots of 811 arguments going on there. It would be good for people to see that states are rising up against dres.
Go for it, Robin. Even though a summary a link to the original is always preferred (since we often update items etc.)
It has taken over three years for the judge mentioned in this article to “get it”. NJ has gone through three attorney generals in that time and none of them cared to do anything about this issue until they were forced by law signed by the NJ legislature to put printers on the machines by 2008. Instead of attacking Rush Holt for his support of printers, perhaps his sticking with this topic is the reason we’re at this juncture.
If we had screamed that the law passed in NJ wasn’t perfect enough for us and fought its passing, we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunities we’ve had to prove how flawed DREs are.
Beth #4
Thank you and I understand. However, NJ passed a law that did no harm. HR-811 does a lot of harm and little to no good and any good will not happen for years. I was right to speak out against HR-811.
You are correct though that we probably went a bit overboard in attacking Holt. For that, I’m sorry.
Hah! Move over, Monty Python and Franz Kafka. What is the main Bradblog rss feed address? Today’s page is full of good news.
Adam – That would be:
https://bradblog.com/?feed=rss
Let it feed!
You know, the irony that John points out goes even deeper.
It’s not simply that the machines protected by Holt’s bill may not be allowed in his own home State.
It’s that the thing that triggered this acknowledgement of a “crisis”, as Judge Feinberg called it, was an evaluation of the VVPAT printers.. the same printers, ironically, that Hoyer and PFAW have proposed as the billion dollar compromise in the “Manager’s Mark” version of the bill.
Not to sound spiteful or disrespectful, but that is pretty damned ironic.