This afternoon a state appellate panel in Albany is hearing a case to reinstate a good government group lawsuit against the state Board of Elections for wrongly allowing new voting machines that dispense with the indispensable needed for a secure franchise: paper ballots.
Yes, good old paper is the best and only way to have foolproof elections. It is something that Donald Trump has long insisted on and he is entirely correct. Unlike computers, paper can’t be hacked.
Following the 2000 Bush/Gore debacle in Florida, a joint MIT/Caltech review concluded that paper ballots filled out by voters and fed by voters in scanning machines was the optimal method. If there is a problem or a close contest, just open up the machines and hand count the paper. That is now the law in New York.
The new gizmo, called the ExpressVote XL, is made by the same firm that manufactures the scanning machines now used by New York City and many other counties in the state, Election Systems & Software. But while we like the ES&S scanners, we vote thumbs down on the ExpressVote XL.
It is a giant touchscreen machine. After the voter makes her choices it prints a paper ballot to be displayed behind a clear plastic shield. If the choices are correct, the voter presses a button to cast the ballot. But the offices and names on the paper aren’t what the computer counts. It tallies the barcodes that are also printed on the paper. Sorry, we don’t read barcode and neither do any other humans.
The state board should never have approved these things, but ES&S deployed lobbyists and got it authorized on Aug. 2, 2023. And so sued Common Cause. A judge dismissed the case in April 2024 because there was no harm as none of the state’s counties had bought them. But a month later, in May, Monroe County, where Rochester is located, bought the bad machines and has started using them.
Common Cause asked to update the court case and it was denied, which was pretty dense of the judges. And now the case hinges not on the facts that these machines fail to follow state law, but that it was filed too late, which it wasn’t.
The law says that the machines must “Provide the voter an opportunity to privately and independently verify votes selected and the ability to privately and independently change such votes or correct any error before the ballot is cast and counted.” Since the votes are the barcodes, voters can’t verify anything.
That should be enough for the courts to get rid of the ExpressVote XL.
The state Senate has passed an excellent bill mandating true paper ballots, called a “human readable paper ballot,” but the same ES&S lobbying has it bottled up in the Assembly.
Want more problems? How about that mail ballots and affidavit ballots will continue to be real, non-barcoded, while the dopey ExpressVote XL will make barcoded ones and that violates the law that ballots be uniform. Also, the ExpressVote XL will cause long lines at polling places. Stay with real paper.
