Remember when you first went to vote and realized that the lever machines were gone?
You may soon be in for a similar surprise. If the NY legislature fails to pass VIVA NY, the Voting Integrity and Verification Act of New York (A5934a/S6169a), your city or county could ditch hand-marked paper ballots in your polling place. You would have to mark your ballot through a touchscreen.
"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."
Time: "Immediately after the settlement was announced (Fox $787.5 million), Poulos says, Dominion experienced a spike in death threats. Keeping his workforce safe remains a company priority…. Poulos emphasizied that Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency and its existing capability of producing paper ballots. But that defense may come too late."
NYTimes; "The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation, according to David Cross, a lawyer involved in civil litigation over election security in Georgia filed by the Coalition for Good Governance.”
SUMMARY: "Maybe now Jack Smith will start investigating the multi-state criminal plot by MAGA conspiracists to breach voting system software? Now that we know the unlawful scheme actually began in Donald Trump's Oval Office, as overseen by Trump himself, back in December of 2020? [Audio link to full show follows below.]"
SUMMARY: CNN "On January 7, 2021..., two people walked into an elections office in Coffee County, Georgia...A local election official helped them gain access to sensitive voting data which they downloaded onto a portable hard drive. ...That data was then uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with several Trump allies and operatives....In a December 2022 letter to the FBI, Susan Greenhalgh,…of Free Speech For People, described how copies of the voting data from Coffee County have been “shared covertly with an unknown number of election deniers.” The letter warned that the data “could be used to sow distrust in elections, fabricate evidence to challenge legitimate election results, or even to manipulate election results in the future.”...Greenhalgh ... has asked the FBI and Smith’s team to investigate the Coffee County breach as recently as this week…
Why hasn't the FBI begun a probe of the multi-state effort, headed up by Trump's then-attorney Sidney Powell, to unlawfully and surreptitiously make copies of voting and tabulation system software in at least four states after the 2020 election? We now know that this happened in Coffee County, Georgia, Mesa County, Colorado, several townships in Michigan, and at least one county in Pennsylvania. We also have evidence that the conspirators planned to breach the election system in Nevada as well.
From Heather Cox Richardson:
President Joe Biden spoke this afternoon in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived. Standing at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which had been named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, Biden said: “On this bridge, blood was given to help ‘redeem the soul of America.’”
The story of March 7, 1965, commemorated today in Selma, is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, worked to make the hurdles of that process insurmountable.
". Fox lied about election fraud and should be held accountable for that, and Dominion and other voting system vendors have repeatedly failed in American elections. ...By way of fresh evidence to support that charge, we close with details on voting system failures in both New Jersey and California in November of 2022…"
There's a reason I always warn, when reporting election results on The BradCast, that they have only been tallied by computers to date, and that errors in results often do not come to light until days, weeks or even months after elections...if ever. ...there is no way to know for certain either way unless and until results of hand-marked paper ballots are examined by actual human beings
A friend of mine summarized this voting machine failure:
1. A computerized voting machine system failed to count votes accurately, and, until irregularities in an unrelated issue caused the Board of Elections to launch an internal investigation, nobody knew
2. It was not detected by a post-election audit
3. The discovered error in the voting system changed the result of the election, AFTER it had been certified by the local board and the wrong “winner” took office.
4. The voting machine system in use was the ExpressVote XL – which happens to be a machine that I am trying to persuade people in New York not to certify for use and/or to legislatively prohibit.
Comment: The ESS Expressvote voting machine involved in this miscount is currently under review for certification in New York. Last year the NYS Senate passed a bill to ban this type of voting machine but the Assembly did not vote it out of committee. Let your Assembly member know that you want to protect your vote by mandating hand marked paper ballots that are hand counted in audits and close vote elections.
Allegra Dengler
Update: Since this article was published, we were very appreciative that the NYS Senate passed the Hybrid Voting Machine ban (S309B) but unfortunately the heavily lobbied Assembly did not vote it out of committee. So we are again working for legislation to protect our hand marked paper ballots as well as to have them recounted by hand in close vote margin elections and audits. Instead of progress to protect our existing system based on hand marked paper ballots, a new bill has been introduced to make things even worse. Let your NY state elected official know that you oppose S1014/A1259. which would allow audits to also be counted by machine instead of by hand.
The controversial ESS Expressvote XL has not been certified, yet. The Dominion ICX is in the process of certification. The ICX has a version that would protect the hand-marked paper ballot but another version does not.
A very close race in Onondaga County led to a hand count that did not change the winner but changed the final vote slightly, with some votes disqualified. "The removed votes came primarily from voters who either identified themselves (placing their initials on the ballot, for example) or made such small marks inside the oval that it wasn’t clear they even meant to cast a vote (so-called “hesitation marks.”)” "All told, that resulted in in Mannion losing 18 votes and Shiroff losing 11 votes from the recount figures.”