Secret ballots and voting machines: Keep New York elections verifiable to voters
New York Daily News Teresa Hommel
"Voter-marked paper ballots enable each voter to cast the votes he or she intends. They also allow election boards to perform manual recounts and audits to confirm final tallies….Several new voting systems on the market, however, require voters to use a touchscreen to enter their choices on a displayed image of the ballot. ...New Yorkers need to send emails and make telephone calls to urge swift passage of Voting Integrity and Verification Act of New York (VIVA NY), number A5934-A/S6169-A We should contact Speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie at Speaker@nyassembly.gov or (718) 654-6539. We must also contact Latrice Walker, chair of the Assembly Committee on Election Law, at WalkerL@nyassembly.gov or (718) 342-1256, as well as Zellnor Myrie, chair of the Senate Elections Committee, at myrie@nysenate.gov or (718) 284-4700."
Secret ballots and voting machines: Keep New York elections verifiable to voters
By Teresa Hommel
New York Daily News • Jun 04, 2023 at 5:00 am
New York State’s voting machines are aging and will need replacement. This creates a challenge for our state: can we get new equipment that is as good as the old?
Our Legislature has given us a solution, a new bill we need to pass this year as soon as possible. It is called the Voting Integrity and Verification Act of New York (VIVA NY), number A5934-A/S6169-A, introduced by Assemblyman Brian Cunningham and state Sen. Cordell Cleare. It gives voters the right to mark a paper ballot, either by hand or by using a machine called a ballot marking device (BMD). The BMD acts like a big, automated pen and enables voters with disabilities to mark and verify their ballot privately and independently.
Voter-marked paper ballots enable each voter to cast the votes he or she intends. They also allow election boards to perform manual recounts and audits to confirm final tallies.
Several new voting systems on the market, however, require voters to use a touchscreen to enter their choices on a displayed image of the ballot. These systems are vulnerable to programming errors and hacking like all computers, but they don’t let each voter mark a non-computerized paper ballot to record his or her intended voting choices. As a result these systems do not allow problems to be found or corrected.
Some touchscreen systems count votes directly from the screen, during which programming errors may switch or delete votes but those mistakes would not be visible or detectable.
Some touchscreen voting systems print a narrow strip of paper with a list of ballot contests and the voter’s choices in each one. Voters are supposed to review and confirm that the printed text on paper contains the same selections they made on the touchscreen. Studies show that in real life, however, only about 7% of people can detect errors in such printouts.
But even if voters could verify successfully, that printed text is ignored by the touchscreen system’s vote tabulator. Some systems, as noted, count the votes obtained directly from the screen. Other systems print a second summary on the strip of paper in the form of bar codes or QR codes, and the tabulator counts votes from those codes. Such codes are not readable by voters, so even if voters verify the text on their paper strip they are not verifying the votes that will be counted.
Computers have always been vulnerable to errors and cybercrime. Normal computer security requires each transaction to have a tracking number. A marked ballot is like a transaction, but our ballots are not allowed to have tracking numbers or any marks that identify the voter. The secret ballot protects voters from coercion and retribution, but it means that people must observe all handling of votes and ballots to ensure correct election results.
The VIVA-NY bill would guarantee each voter a paper ballot where we can mark our votes and observe that they are correctly marked before being cast and counted.
Election observers need to witness ballot handling, storage, and counting. When these activities take place inside a computer where meaningful observation is impossible, recounts become essential. This is why recounts must be done by manual hand-to-eye scrutiny of voter-marked paper ballots so observers see the ballots and watch the counts being marked on a tally sheet. Having voter-marked paper ballots means that accurate final tallies can be determined.
Election administrators need to confirm correct ballot programming and computer settings by performing pre-election tests on each machine and post-election hand-to-eye recounts to confirm election results. Successful testing and recounts require easy-to-see, voter-verified votes. Without these procedures the wrong candidate might be declared the winner, as happened in Monmouth County, N.J., in 2022.
New Yorkers need to send emails and make telephone calls to urge swift passage of VIVA NY. We should contact Speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie at Speaker@nyassembly.gov or (718) 654-6539. We must also contact Latrice Walker, chair of the Assembly Committee on Election Law, at WalkerL@nyassembly.gov or (718) 342-1256, as well as Zellnor Myrie, chair of the Senate Elections Committee, at myrie@nysenate.gov or (718) 284-4700.
We need to urge our own assembly member and state senator to co-sponsor and work to pass this bill. We can find them at nyassembly.gov/mem/search/ and nysenate.gov/find-my-senator.
We can tell our legislators that voter-marked paper ballots are the easiest for everyone to mark and verify, and they enable our election boards to verify and audit final tallies. Our emails and calls can protect our future elections.
Hommel is a corporate trainer in computer technology.