The voting process in New York is about to go through a major reformation starting tomorrow.  Two major vendors have made it to the final cut and tomorrow morning the Board of Elections here in NYC will make their official choice.  Here's the NY Times' take on the matter...

After years of delays and missteps, the city’s Board of Elections is expected to choose new electronic voting machines on Tuesday that will be rolled out in time for the September primary. In so doing, New York City will become one of the last places in the country to get rid of its lever-operated voting machines.

To avoid the Florida election debacle of 2000 and to help disabled people vote, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Several legislatures quickly selected new voting systems for their entire states.

Albany, however, was so delinquent in selecting a system that the Justice Department sued New York State in 2006 and threatened to take away federal money set aside for any costs associated with the transition to new technology.

Eventually, the New York Legislature allowed cities and counties to make their own choices, and New York City was one of the last to do so.

...In a report examining the replacement of NY's existing mechanical voting machines with electronic voting devices, the NYC Board of Elections weighed the merits of two possible vendors, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting, for the $70 million plus contract.  As such, the relative merits of ES&S and Dominion have been much debated - both publicly and privately.  The report weighed the merits of each system in dozens of different categories, assigning a numeric score to both vendors for each category, with 4.995 being a perfect score and ES&S came out as the recommended vendor for implementing an electronic voting system by a score of 3,417 to 3,395. 

Adding to the support for the Board Report's investigative results, again according to a NY times article, ES&S is the dominant company in the U.S. for electronic voting machines and they discuss how the systems basically work...

The two voting systems are similar. After signing in, a voter fills out his or her ballots at one of several voting stations, which are like raised desks, with dividers to offer privacy. The voter then walks a short distance to a scanning machine, which displays instructions on a computer touch screen on how to scan in the ballot.

After the voter feeds the ballots into the machine, they drop into a locked box underneath as backup hard copies in the event of any disputes or recounts. The voter is asked, through a series of screen prompts, questions designed to guarantee that the voter’s choices are final.

...so with the report from the Board in hand, it would seem obvious that the ES&S system would be selected tomorrow morning.  Yet, there is word circulating that, not withstanding a number of potential problems with the Dominion product, the Board may choose to vote against their own report's finding for the Canadian company.

Erroll Louis of the Daily News editorialized on why this may be the case last week...

The staff of the Board of Elections, comparing 34 different measures, has formally given the edge to ES&S. But the 10 commissioners of the board - appointed by the Republican and Democratic parties in each of the five boroughs - could end up rejecting the staff recommendation and selecting the inferior machine.

Each firm has spent lavishly on lobbyists. Dominion has paid $64,000 this year to Stanley Schlein, an ex-chairman of the Civil Service Commission with a client list that includes top Bronx Democrats. ES&S has spent $193,000 on a bevy of lobbyists including Hank Sheinkopf, Norman Levy and powerhouse firm Davidoff, Malito & Hutcher.

The presence of so many political operators adds a troubling degree of back-room influence to the process. That became clear at the final public hearing on the contract, when Elections Commissioner J.C. Polanco, a talented young reformer, grilled representatives of Dominion.

Under questioning, it turned out the company had publicly claimed its selection would create 200 jobs in Brooklyn alone - a gross exaggeration, the Dominion employee finally acknowledged. ES&S, which has 73% of the nationwide markets, has only 350 full-time employees.

Companies have the right to hire lobbyists to help accomplish their goals. But this isn't supposed to be a jobs program, or a back-room deal.

New York is on the verge of turning our future voting process over to an unelected clique of people pursuing profits and power. That's no way to run a democracy.

...supporting the concerns of many non-English speaking voters, The Korean American Voter's council was also among the groups who have formally endorsed ES&S as the best choice, as well as a number of disabled American groups who have publicly done the same.

However, despite the recommendation of its own report and others, we'll still have to wait and see what machine the politically appointed Board officially chooses tomorrow.  The future of Democracy in this city hangs in the balance...

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