Paper Trail Delayed Again

by: agr

Mon Nov 17, 2008 at 07:33:04 PM EST

Legislation that the Assembly State Government Committee advanced on Thursday would scrap a Jan. 1 deadline to have all the machines fitted with printers.

Well, when you actually look at the bill, it is 1 (small) municipality in each county.:

The pilot program shall be conducted at the primary election to be held on June 2, 2009.  It shall consist of retrofitted voting machines in one municipality in each county that: 1) has no more than ten election districts; and 2) will be using voting machines in the election that the Secretary of State has certified can be adapted to include a voter-verified paper record system.

And how will they be determining whether the results are satisfactory? You'd think that with each county having no more than 10 voting districts (within a single municipality), for a PRIMARY where turnout is likely to be <30% (OK, that's a guess, and will be different in different towns) a basic thing to do would be to count all of those votes manually, and compare the results to the each of the machine counts. But what does the bill actually propose?

The report shall include information from surveys.

If the Secretary of State likes the results, we'll have these printers by the Nov 2010 election. If not, I guess it's back to the drawing board.

If the entire state would cost $26 million, how could it cost $1 million for only one municipality?

Now there are others that want to switch to an optical scan system. I wonder what that would cost? Would it be more or less than the proposed $26 million? The group New Yorkers for Verified Voting estimated in 2005 $10660 per district, and $114,423,640 for the entire state. Connecticut estimated in December 2006 that replacing all of their machines with optical scan machines would cost a total of $15.7 million.

Does anyone know how many voting districts there are in NJ vs. NY or CT? It seems like this might not only be the more verifiable way to go, but it also might be cheaper.