LRCO Hosts Demo of New Voting Devices

A demonstration for the Dominion Imagecast, an electronic voting device that tabulates votes by optically scanning ballots and is poised to replace all lever-based voting machines immediately in time for the September 14 primaries, was held during Thursday night's meeting of the Lake Ronkonkoma Civic Organization at the American Legion Hall on Church Street. 

Leg. Tom Muratore (R - 4th District) and State Sen. Brian X. Foley (D- Blue Point) each spoke briefly prior to the meeting about village business before Foley shifted attention to the tabulators, praising their efficacy and simple use before ceding the floor to Suffolk County Board of Elections clerk Jean Heath, who spoke at greater length along with fellow clerk Irene D'Abramo about using the tabulators, also touching on the developments that led to the redundancy of the lever machines in governmental elections. Similar demonstrations of the tabulators were being held elsewhere in the county by the County Board. 

A privacy booth allows the voter to mark a paper ballot by hand, filling in a square next to the candidate's name. If the voter wishes to cast a write-in vote, a blank row at the bottom of the ballot can be used to stamp or write the name of the write-in candidate. The ballot can then be placed in an optional secrecy sleeve while the voter brings it to the tabulator itself, an optical scanning device that requires the voter to insert the filled-out ballot similar to sending a fax. 

After the ballot is scanned, it is deposited into a container below the scanner - the ballot in effect becoming its own paper trail. If a voter wants to change their vote, they must present their old ballot to a polling inspector, who must then mark the ballot as "spoiled" before giving the voter a new ballot. 

"We can go back to every single ballot and every single vote on it," assured Heath during the demonstration.

Ballot-marking devices will be at polling stations as well as the tabulators to accommodate disabled voters, which can be used with a sip-and-puff interface for voters without full use of their hands or an audio ballot for blind and/or language-impaired voters. The tabulators have no Internet connectivity, which Heath noted was one of the reasons they were selected by the County Board.

Voters are permitted to change a vote up to three times per election before a final tabulation. No names or personal information will appear on the ballots. The ballots will be presented in both Spanish and English, and proposals will be printed on the ballot's reverse side. Ballot-marking devices also have bilingual capability.

The impetus for electronic voting began with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in October 2002, which called for the standardization of all elections nationwide and in doing so, replacing all mechanical voting systems with electronic means including optical scanners and touch-screen machines, though the law granted states choices of how to implement this, said Heath. 

New York is the last state in the nation, and Suffolk the last county in the state, to avoid compliance with HAVA. New York State's Legislature passed the Election Reform Modernization Act (ERMA) in 2005, outlawing lever machines and creating the statutory framework that would eventually be enacted by the State Board. A lawsuit challenging the introduction of electronic voting devices was filed in 2006 by Suffolk County executive Steve Levy against the State Board of Elections, arguing against the cost of replacing 1,500 lever machines and in favor of their reliability.

In a different lawsuit, the United States Department of Justice filed against the State Board in 2007 as it had not implemented HAVA, with lever machines still in use throughout the State at that time. In 2008, a federal judge handed down a decision ordering County Boards to purchase new electronic voting devices or lose the federal funding each county had allotted to buy them, mandating that electronic voting devices must be used in the September 2010 primary and thus banning lever machines from further use in governmental elections.

Different regulations are still being promulgated today, according to Tom Knobel, assistant to the Commissioner of the County Board.

"We're not directly following HAVA, but the State's interpretation of it," he said, adding that small changes to election law, including procedures pertaining to canvassing and absentee ballots, have been made reflect the new standard, updated from what was a less common voting method reserved for special situations.

Concerns over the efficacy of the tabulators were raised on the state level as well. In a July 14, 2008 posting on Wired.com's Threat Level blog, contributor Kim Zetter reported that New York State had "found problems with 50 percent of the roughly 1,500 ImageCast optical-scan machines that Sequoia Voting Systems has delivered to the state so far — machines that are slated to be used by dozens of counties in the state's September 9 primary and November 4 presidential election." The report also quoted Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the State Board, accusing Sequoia Voting Systems of a perceived lack of quality control:

"There's no way the vendor could be adequately reviewing the machines and having so many problems. What it tells us is that the vendor just throws this stuff over the transom and does not do any alpha- or beta-testing of their own before they apply for certification testing. Then they expect that we'll identify technical glitches and then they'll correct those glitches. But correction of those glitches is an extraordinarily time-consuming process. And it's very disappointing that this equipment is not ready for prime time."

Knobel confirmed that the tabulators were subjected to rigorous testing since that time, when the tabulators were not yet certified for use. The tabulators were finally certified in December 2009. Sequoia Voting Systems, who marketed the tabulators for Dominion Voting, has since been bought out by the company.

Civic Organization president George Schramm said he was satisfied with the tabulator as a replacement for the lever machines, adding that he thought Heath and D'Abramo had allayed the concerns of the audience by describing the process and that the process, despite the technology it now incorporates, is not far removed from how ballots had been cast centuries ago.

"I think it's an improvement," concurred Ann Zapata of Holbrook, a member of the Civic Organization. "It's wonderful that they're using recycled paper for the ballots, and also wonderful that we can write in preferred candidates on the bottom."

A video detailing the process can be found at suffolkvotes.com, the Suffolk County Board of Election's website.