Comment: Too bad this editorial didn’t sway the NYS Board of Elections. They certified the controversial voting machine yesterday, August 2. ALLEGRA DENGLER
Paper ballots are a must: The NYS Board of Elections must reject the ES&S ExpressVote XL machine
New York Daily News
Published: Aug 02, 2023 at 4:00 am
At noon today, the two Democrats and two Republicans on the state Board of Elections will consider whether to approve the use of a new voting machine that harms the security and surety of elections. The board must say no to the ExpressVote XL, heavily pushed by its manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, looking to reap millions in peddling this contraption.
Sorry, our democracy is not for sale, despite all the New York lobbyists and lawyers and schmoozers that ES&S has hired.
The ExpressVote XL wrongly does away with paper ballots, using a touch screen for voters to select their choices. That is a terrible idea. Paper is the most fool-proof, tamper-proof, glitch-proof, hack-proof method of voting.
Following the 2000 Bush/Gore debacle in Florida with chads and butterfly ballots, a joint team of supersmart people from MIT and Caltech looked at every kind of way to vote and decided that by far the best was using paper ballots, scanned by the voters themselves at the poll sites. That was good enough for us and we’ve championed paper ballots ever since.
And we’re not alone. Donald Trump, who we have a great many differences with, is absolutely correct that paper ballots are the best. As he was contesting the presidential election, on Dec. 2, 2020 (before he stoked a mob to sack the Capitol) he put a video on Facebook: “We have a company that’s very suspect. Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this? We have to go to paper. Maybe it takes longer. But the only secure system is paper.”
While he was very wrong about Dominion, which just won $787.5 million from Fox News for defamation for repeating the lies and wrong about the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chávez, now dead for 10 years, fooling around with the counting, Trump was very correct about paper ballots. And he’s kept up his call as he runs for White House for third time, stressing that voting should be done with “only paper ballots.”
Are the two Republicans on the state board, Peter Kosinski and Anthony Casale, now going to torpedo that?
Should the ExpressVote XL be approved, there would be two different kinds of ballots in New York, actual real paper filled out by voters at home by those who’ve opted by mail voting and the ExpressVote XL pseudo paper ballots that the machine prepares. As state law requires hand counts of the paper ballots in very tight contests, like the last year’s election for a state Supreme Court judgeship in central New York, where a million paper ballots were tallied by hand, it would mean different ballots being counted in different ways. A recipe for a huge mess.
And should Gov. Hochul sign a bill to expand voting by mail, which is the easiest and most secure way to exercise the franchise, the divergence between ExpressVote XL’s machine voting “ballots” and real ballots would only grow.
By the way, ExpressVote XL uses Windows 10 from Microsoft and Microsoft announced that support for Windows 10 will end on Oct. 14, 2025.