“Had this election been conducted on the trouble-plagued software-driven optical scanners, as is planned for future elections in the state, none of us would be sure of the winner,” said Andrea Novick, an attorney for the Election Transparency Coalition, in a statement released last week. “The original count—currently required to be ascertained openly and the canvass fully completed on election night before the ballots are removed from public view—is to be replaced with a less secure and concealed canvass, resulting in a preliminary original count which will no longer be certain or complete on election night.”

The Election Transparency Coalition opposes the mandated switch from lever voting machines to electronic—a mandate that was not required by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 but instead was introduced in the state’s own legislation, the New York Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005. The coalition’s efforts to block a switch to computerized voting machines, such as optical scanning machines, have been bolstered in recent months by a number of counties whose governing bodies have passed resolutions in opposition to the switch. Among those counties are Columbia, Greene, Dutchess, and Ulster.

Columbia County Democratic Election Commissioner Virginia Martin said the new voting machines will invisibly tabulate votes and thus prevent election officials and observers from detecting error or fraud in the count.

"Every opportunity to detect and deter error or fraud is built into New York's electoral system in order that those responsible for the count can be certain of the results. A state, charged with the responsibility for conducting elections, should have to prove that it did its job correctly with physical, reliable evidence. That's what we saw in this last election," Joanne Lukacher, director of the Election Transparency Coalition, said in a prepared statement. Martin said the new technologies lag in comparison to the reliability of the lever voting machines that have been used for decades in Columbia County.

“The lever machines are difficult to hack into, make it difficult to throw an election, and provide a paper trail,” said Martin. “The bottom line is the lever machines have worked very well for decades now.”

Novick added that “unlike the lever machine where observers witness the programming of each machine before every election, no one will be able to see the programming of the software. Dozens of reports from computer scientists corroborate that software can be undetectably manipulated—producing false reports that will not be discernable to election officials or the public.” Indeed, the only safeguard included in the optical scanning technology favored by proponents for change would be a sampling of three percent of the ballots scanned into the machine.

“That is too small of a sampling to provide an accurate gauge,” said Martin. “How do you decide which three percent? In which races?”

"If we had used totally the electronic process in this last election, with the challenges and the questions about the vote put before us, we might still be dealing with it," said Republican Columbia County Elections Commissioner Don Kline.

Martin maintains that the new computerized voting machines are not reliable. As evidence of the difficulty with the new technology, Martin cited her recent attempt to open a ballot-marking device in a Claverack polling place during the Special Election on March 31. The ballot-marking devices have been used for more than a year to provide a more accessible way for the disabled to cast their votes.

“I went to the polling place . . . [and] noticed the ballot-marking device was not up and running yet. . . . I took the cover off and tried to get it going. I didn’t get far before it stopped. So I did what they advised and rebooted, and it didn’t even go as far it did the first time. I ended up having to call the technician in,” said Martin. “The problem we have is the technician does the testing in the central location and then [the machines] get trucked out to the polling places, where they have to be opened. On Election Day, sometimes the poll workers can’t get them going.”

Martin said residents need to be confident that the voting machine they use on Election Day will record their vote accurately. “We need to be confident that our machines are working well and accurately. The way that is done now is through the combination of lever voting machines with ballot-marking devices," she said.

Yet another problem with the electronic machines is the cost—which would come at a time when the county, state, and nation are trying to reduce expenses as much as possible.

While Kline said that the county already has optical scan technology in its 52 ballot-scanning voting machines, there are other costs that would be associated with the technology. Those include purchasing enclosures in which voters can fill out their ballots, certified by the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the cost of the ballots themselves. Because voters can throw away their first ballot if they make an error and try again, every election will require printing twice as many ballots as the number of votes expected to be cast.

Martin said that if the state does not rescind its move to optical scanning devices as a result of the opposition, litigation may be the only way to halt the move. To that end, the Election Transparency Coalition has prepared a lawsuit alleging that state legislature has “no authority to enact legislation which makes the right to vote less secure.”