About

Our BOARD

Allegra Dengler

Allegra Dengler has participated in elections as an elected official, as a candidate for Mayor of Dobbs Ferry, as a District Leader, and as a poll watcher in New York and Florida. Allegra participated in recounts in New York and New Hampshire and traveled to Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, Washington DC and Costa Rica to observe elections and meet with election security experts. Her passion is fighting climate change and species extinction, but after Bush v Gore, she realized that all her efforts must go to protecting the vote count, so that anti-environment candidates don’t take office because of insecure election technology and procedures that make it impossible to verify who actually won.

Nicola Coddington

Former Trustee and Mayor of the Village of Irvington, frequent poll watcher since 2005, and current Democratic District Leader, Nicola Coddington has much experience with elections. Her observations as an election protection volunteer in the 2004 election in Florida, with their then-new touch-screen voting machines, led her to return to New York state and help found Citizens for Voting Integrity to work on the successful statewide efforts for hand-marked paper ballots and scanners when the lever machines had to be retired. She is passionate about election integrity as a cornerstone of our representative democracy. In her work life, she is a consultant and community educator on renewable energy and climate change, as well as a writer.

George Klein

George Klein has been an environmental leader with the Sierra Club since 1990, focusing on environmental issues in New York’s Hudson Valley, and statewide. He worked with Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter and Citizens for Voting Integrity intensively in 2003-2005 to help move the state to hand-marked paper ballots, and returned in 2018 to help defend and extend general voting security.

VIRGINIA MARTIN

Virginia Martin served as Democratic Election Commissioner in Columbia County, New York from 2008 to early 2020. She received her PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in rhetoric and communication and has taught at both RPI and the University at Albany. Since the introduction of optical scanners in 2010, she and her Republican counterpart conducted full hand counts of paper ballots in every election. They developed an efficient, prompt, cost-effective, and fully secure bipartisan process that welcomed public oversight. Its modest funding was spent locally on appreciative and well-trained poll workers. Martin is frequently called upon by various organizations and the media to speak about her county's vote-tabulation process.

Vanessa Merton

Vanessa Merton, J.D., teaches and directs the Immigration Justice Clinic of Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New York. The Clinic provides free legal services to noncitizens who otherwise could not afford legal assistance, in an effort to make the U.S. government obey its own immigration law. Similarly, as Vice-Chair of the Village Democratic Committee of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, and an election security volunteer for over twenty years in Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York, Prof. Merton seeks to enforce the basic constitutional mandate of democracy: one person, one vote, and every vote counted. Also important is eliminating the pernicious, pervasive effect of big money and concentrated media in politics.

Julie Weiner

Julie Weiner, professionally a licensed mental health counselor, has been an antiwar activist all her adult life. Since the halting of the 2000 Florida vote count in a presidential election that ultimately resulted in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she has increasingly focused her activism on election integrity. In January, 2005, She attended the Congressional hearings held by John Conyers in Ohio, where the ease of election manipulation using touchscreen voting machines was demonstrated. In the summer of 2019, she helped organize, with the United Nations Association, a Universal Periodic Review of election integrity in the U.S. that was submitted to the UN Human Rights Commission. She currently works with several organizations in addition to CVINY to persuade local and federal legislators to protect our elections with hand marked, 100% hand counted paper ballots, and to ban the use of tabulating ballot marking devices. She is a District Leader in Yonkers and has also volunteered as a poll watcher.

In Memoriam

Linda deStefano

For a few precious months early on in the pandemic, the members of the board of Citizens for Voting integrity were privileged to work on election integrity with the creative, brilliant, thoughtful Syracuse environmental- and animal-rights activist Linda DeStefano. Linda had been active in the movement to protect our elections from the time the Help America Vote Act required New York to retire the old lever voting machines. The result of those efforts was the New York State legislature – unlike most other states, which adopted touchscreen computerized voting – decided to requiring voting on hand-marked paper ballots counted by optical scanners – a success now undermined by the introduction of voting machines that can print over ballots after they are cast. 

Linda worked with the Syracuse Peace Council and the statewide Sierra Club. She was the president of People for Animal Rights. She understood that success in these concerns requires that the people of the state succeed in protecting our right to have our votes counted as cast.

Linda’ life was cut short in June, 2020, by a car that hit her as she and her husband walked home from a funeral. We are told this shocking event was an accident.

We at CVINY continue to miss Linda’s grounded, logical approach to organizing, and to cherish her contributions.  We `continue to be inspired by her memory, and are trying to live up to her investment in our struggle.