MORE DETAILS: On Friday June 9th, 2023, the last formal day of the NY Legislature, the NY Senate acted responsibly to update the statutes controlling New York voting machines by passing VIVA NY, The Voting Integrity & Verification Act of New York. These statutes have not been significantly updated in 15 years, and revisions are long past due. We are very grateful to the Senate for their serious commitment to improving New York elections.
Unfortunately their colleagues in the New York Assembly are bogged down with conflicts of interest and potentially even illegal lobbying. The2024 session has begun. We encourage you to call the NY Speaker at518-455-3791 and urge him to pass VIVA NY.
The celebrity ad that we produced to support the bill, featuring award-winning actor Andre Braugher and the Executive Director of the Center for Law & Social Justice Lurie Daniel Favors has over 400,000 views now. We’re very grateful to them for sharing their time and energy to support New York voters. Thanks also to Mark Ruffalo, recipient of the Time CO2 Earth Award, for his help.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 22, 2023
FROM: SMART Legislation & Center for Common Ground
SMART Legislation is becoming SMART Elections Action. We will continue to push for actions that protect NY voters so that we can have secure, fair, accessible, well-administered elections that are publicly verifiable. Our goals also include affordability and short wait times for everyone eligible.
Please make a donation today to support our work. We had a successful legislative session. Although we did not get everything we wanted, we made progress.
The bill called VIVA NY (Voting Integrity and Verification Act of NY) to require pen and paper ballots as well as ballot-markers at all polling locations passed the NY Senate. We were very influential in this happening. We were told the bill was dead. All other groups had given up on it, but we ran a celebrity ad that got 400,000 views on social media. With the help of other groups, like Common Cause, the bill was then passed by the NY Senate within 48 hours.
If the bill can pass the NY Assembly next session it will guarantee New Yorkers the right to vote as they have for the last 10 years, with either pen and paper, or a ballot-marker (a touchscreen voting machine, usually for voters with disabilities).
Other legislative successes include
A bill that requires better training for poll workers, including mandatory training on the ballot marking devices.
A bill that requires plain language be used for all referendums
We retained the right to full manual recounts in close elections (a margin of .5% or more). There was an attempt to weaken this, but it was defeated.
We’re hoping to bring an outreach person on board to help us connect with communities throughout the state. Our goal is to raise $5,000. Please make a donation from $5 – $1000 — whatever you can afford — to ensure we can continue this profoundly important work. And please do it right now, while you’re thinking of it!
New York voters need protection and you can help. We want to continue to vote with a pen & paper, the way we have for years. It helps reduce costs, keeps wait times down, and is preferred by security & auditing experts.
Our elections are at a dangerous crossroads.New types of voting machines, called “all-in-one” and “universal-use”, are attempting to flood the state. These systems do not allow you to vote with a pen and paper. Legislation, called VIVA NY, has been proposed to help. It passed the NY Senate, but not the Assembly. We believe well-connected lobbyists for expensive voting machines are blocking the bill.
But the NY Assembly is in session for one last day on June 21st, and we are asking them to pass the bill.
We are sharing a celebrity video &
calling the Speaker of the NY Assembly.
When you share the video – here is a message you can tweet:
Do the right thing @CarlHeastie Let voters choose how they vote, not lobbyists. Hand-marked paper ballots cost less, make lines shorter & are reliable for audits. @LtGovDelgado, @GovKathyHochul @RepJeffries @NYAMCunningham Pass #VIVANY! #NYAssembly #StopListeningToLobbyists
Suggested Script: Please pass VIVA New York immediately. We want to make sure voters have the option to vote with both a hand-marked paper ballot and a ballot marking device in all NY polling places. This is how we’ve been voting and it works great. New voting machines are coming into the state that will eliminate hand-marked paper ballots wherever they are used if we don’t pass this bill. Please pass this bill immediately.
When you dial #250 you’ll be connected to a switchboard that connects you to NY Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and makes it easier for you to have an impact. Here are more detailed instructions.
Suggested Script: I’m asking you to co-sponsor and support the immediate passage of VIVA New York. We want to make sure voters have the option to vote with both a hand-marked paper ballot and a ballot marking device in all NY polling places. This is how we’ve been voting and it works great. New voting machines are coming into the state that will eliminate hand-marked paper ballots wherever they are used if we don’t pass this bill. Please co-sponsor and pass this bill immediately.
New voting systems are scheduled for approval in Summer of 2023.
More Info: One of these new voting systems also wraps your vote in a barcode. The barcode is what’s counted, not the text you see. There is no way for you to verify who you are voting for.
DON’T ENCODE MY VOTE IN A BARCODE.
One of the voting machines applying for use in NY counts votes with barcodes. Experts say that using barcodes to count votes makes it “impossible for the voter to verify who they voted for.”
You can join the coalition fighting to preserve our way of voting in New York.
12pm on Fridays – Open discussion about the problem and solutions with voting machines and elections in New York. Strategy meeting to pass urgent legislation and make sure the voting machines we use in New York protect voters and elections.
Areas of interest: Voting Rights, Election Security, Communities of Color
New York City – June 30, 2022 — New York’s governor Kathy Hochul is convening the New York Senate and Assembly in an Extraordinary Session to address necessary changes to gun safety laws. There is another extremely urgent issue that the governor and legislature must also address at this time.
The New York State Board of Elections is in the process of approving voting machines that experts say “will deteriorate our security and our ability to have confidence in our elections.” These systems have a variety of designs, but they can be implemented without using any hand-marked paper ballots. Because of this, there is concern that elections held on these voting machines cannot be confirmed by audits. One system reviewed by CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) was found to have multiple serious security flaws.
Over twenty good government groups, including those fighting for civil and disability rights, have written memos of support asking the legislature to take immediate action to protect New York voters from the imminent danger that experts warn these voting systems represent.
Markers for Democracy says of the voting machines, “Once approved they will be almost impossible to eliminate,” noting that, “These systems are tangled in litigation and controversy.” In states where these voting machines are in use, litigation is moving forward, lines have been as long as 10 hours to vote, and one county recorded a 100% vote of no confidence.
In their memo, the Black Institute focuses on how these voting machines, if approved, will affect communities of color saying, “And who will get the worst of these systems, if they are approved? History tells us it will be communities of color that will be most impacted by this poorly conceived and badly executed technology.”
Reinvent Albany says in their memo that if these voting machines are put into use across the state, “… entire elections could be thrown into turmoil.”
LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION
Two bills that have already passed the New York Senate and are pending in the Assembly, could solve the problem. A1115C/S309B, known as the Protect Our Ballots Act, will establish some of the best election security protections in the country and ensure that any voting machines that are approved, will be used in a way that follows best security practices.
The other recommended bill is A829A/S6211 to give the State Board of Elections more discretion in rejecting voting machines that are not proper, safe, and secure.
Previous support for the bills came in a series of letters signed by over two dozen elections and election security experts along with forty-five good government and civil rights groups.
ADDRESSING OPPOSITION
The only group on record opposing A1115C/S309B is the New York State Conference of the NAACP, who filed a last-minute letter on the day before the end of the legislative session. The letter mirrored the points made by a lobbyist for one of the voting machine vendors: ES&S.
In a memo supporting A1115C/S309B, the Reverend Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, former president of the North Carolina NAACP says, “In North Carolina, the NAACP, fought and even went to court so that voters would have the option of hand-marked paper ballots, along with ballot-markers … Unlike in North Carolina, the [NY] State Conference of the NAACP has sadly allied itself with the voting machine vendors, and not the voters it is pledged to protect.”
Dr. Spearman added that, “Getting hand-marked paper ballots in Guilford County was not easy. As in New York, vendors leaned heavily on the state to purchase expensive ballot-markers for all voters. I was against this because the machine in question, the ExpressVote (produced by ES&S), counts votes with barcodes, which I cannot read.”
ES&S is trying to get a similar voting machine called the ExpressVote XL approved in New York. It is a voting machine that counts votes with barcodes. A1115C would prohibit votes from being counted with barcodes, because security experts say they add unnecessary risk to elections. CISA identified barcodes as an attack vector that could change the results of elections. So ES&S would have to change that part of the machine, along with other problematic features, or it could not be approved for use in New York. Dr. Spearman said that his county saved six million dollars by choosing the hand-marked paper ballot option, which allowed them to fund other priorities.
Bertha Lewis, Founder and President of the Black Institute said, “Voters deserve a choice in how they vote. These machines don’t give them a choice. The legislature must come back in session to protect citizens from guns and voters from voting machines that they pay for but give them no choice.”
The Black Institute – Since 2010, we have shaped intellectual discourse and impacted public policy from the perspective of Black people in America and people of color throughout the diaspora by using forward-thinking strategies to achieve racial equity.
Center for Common Ground was founded to educate and empower under-represented voters in voter suppression states to engage in elections and advocate for their right to vote.
SMART Legislation is the Legislative Partner Project for SMART Elections. We author and advocate legislation to protect elections. We want elections to be secure, fair, accessible, well-administered & publicly verifiable. Our goal is to increase public confidence.
FAQ on all-in-one, hybrid, and universal-use voting machines.
New York elections could soon be more vulnerable to hacks, after lobbyists, the NAACP, and the Assembly elections committee chair teamed up to kill an election security bill.
New York’s elections could soon be at risk of getting hacked.
That’s because the state Board of Elections may soon approve certain voting machines that experts say are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. A bill that would have banned those machines passed the state Senate last month, but it died in the state Assembly after the elections committee chair refused to let it come to a vote.
After passing the Senate on May 31, the bill, sponsored by state Senator Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblymember Amy Paulin (D-Westchester), seemed like a solid bet for passage in the Assembly, since it was sponsored by nearly half of the Assembly’s Democrats, as well as several Republicans.
But it never got a vote. It was blocked by a team of opponents including Assemblymember Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the chamber’s Election Law Committee, lobbyists for the voting machine company Election Systems & Software, and—perhaps unexpectedly—the New York State chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, which used language taken directly from a lobbyist’s memo to successfully pressure key lawmakers to kill it.
“New York is going backwards”
When voters in New York go to the polls, they follow the same basic procedure in every county: poll workers hand out paper ballots, then voters select their choices using a pen and run the ballots through a scanning machine, which tabulates the results.
This is the voting method used by most of the country, and has been the status quo in New York for decades. It’s also the voting method that’s least susceptible to hacking or manipulation, according to election security experts. That’s because the counting machines prevent human error in the tabulation of ballots, but if they malfunction or are hacked, the hand-marked ballots leave a “paper trail” that can be manually and independently verified.
Though this procedure is currently used statewide, it’s not mandatory according to New York law. And it could soon be replaced, in some counties, by a far less secure method of voting: ballot marking machines, where voters select their choices on a screen, and the machine prints ballots pre-filled with the voter’s choices. Such machines are currently in limited use primarily for voters who are unable to fill out paper ballots.
Myrie and Paulin’s bill would mandate that voters be allowed to use hand-marked ballots and would ban many of the major ballot marking machines.
Election Systems & Software, the voting machine company that lobbied against the bill, is currently seeking state approval for the ExpressVote XL, a ballot marking machine it manufactures. The machine encodes voters’ choices in barcodes, rather than the traditional filled-in bubbles next to the candidates’ names. Since humans can’t read barcodes, it’s impossible for voters to check whether their selections have been correctly recorded once the machine prints their ballot. The voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems is also seeking state approval for the ImageCast X voting machine, which functions very similarly to the ExpressVote XL.
Election security experts are overwhelmingly critical of the ExpressVote XL and similarly designed machines, arguing that they are easier to hack and harder to verify in case of a recount, since there’s no independent record of voters’ choices. They also take longer to use, potentially exacerbating lines at polling places, and are moreexpensive per voter than hand-marked ballots and ballot scanning machines.
“We cannot entirely trust the computer to be the sole arbiter of counting the vote. We need marks on paper made by people and viewable by people,” said Doug Jones, an elections security expert and retired computer science professor at the University of Iowa.
“Until somebody hacks the voting machine, it will reasonably accurately count the votes. But it will leave [New York] open for a countywide or statewide hack,” Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel said of the machines.
Katina Granger, a spokesperson for Election Systems & Software, pushed back against these criticisms. “The ExpressVote XL is the latest in paper-based election technology and it’s been proven through testing and through real world elections to be secure and accurate,” Granger said, noting that nearly 6 million voters have used it since 2019 without any reports of it being hacked or otherwise compromised.
Because of the potential pitfalls of ballot marking machines, many states that had adopted them over the past two decades have since returned to using hand-marked paper ballots. But bucking this trend, the New York State elections board has indicated that it may soon approve ballot marking machines such as the ExpressVote XL. That would allow local election boards to purchase the machines, as the New York City elections board has already expressed interested in doing.
“State after state has moved from touch screen machines to hand-marked paper ballots,” said Lulu Friesdat, executive director of SMART Legislation, a non-partisan group that lobbied for the bill. “New York is going backwards.”
That’s despite the fact that the head of the state elections board supports the bill that would ban the machines.“Ideally it makes more sense to separate the two functions of the ballot marking device and the [ballot] scanner,” said Board of Elections co-chair Douglas Kellner in an interview earlier this month, echoing another common objection of election security experts. “I do support the bill.”
But under current law, if a voting machine meets New York’s standards for use, the Board isn’t allowed to reject it. A separate bill that would give the Board of Elections authority to reject voting machines if it finds that they aren’t secure also passed the Senate but died in Walker’s committee, meeting the same fate as Myrie and Paulin’s bill.
How to kill a bill
Why didn’t the bill get even a committee vote in the Assembly?
An individual involved in negotiations over the issue supplied New York Focus with documents reflecting internal legislative processes, on the condition that New York Focus not publish or quote from the documents. The documents indicate that Walker, the chair of the Election Law Committee, cited the NAACP’s opposition as a reason for not giving it a vote. Committee chairs generally have control over what bills get votes, though Assembly leadership can sometimes overrule them.
In a statement, Walker said that she “listened to many voices, including those of her colleagues in the Assembly, as well as respected civil rights leader and NAACP icon Hazel Dukes,” the president of the New York State NAACP. She did not answer New York Focus’ questions on which arguments against the bill she found convincing.
The NAACP, however, explained its opposition in public. On June 1, just days before the end of New York’s January-June legislative session and the day after the bill passed the Senate, Dukes sent a letter to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie in opposition to the bill. The letter warned that if the bill passed, it would make it more difficult for people of color, disabled people, and non-English speakers to vote, specifically calling attention to the ExpressVote XL offering voters the choice of a “plethora of languages.”
New York law limits the number of languages on printed ballots to three. But for non-English speakers, there are other votingmachines that do not have the vulnerabilities of the ExpressVote XL, that can offer voters over a dozen languages to choose from.
Asked about the letter’s other claims, Jones, the elections security expert, said that he wasn’t aware of any evidence supporting them.
Whether or not the arguments in Dukes’ letter were true, they weren’t original to her. Several sentences and phrases were copied verbatim from a memo to legislators written by lobbyists for the firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, whose clients include Election Systems & Software.
One argument that both the letter and the memo used in favor of the ExpressVote XL was that a study by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology study found “zero attacks that could alter or manipulate a voter’s choices,” in the words of the Davidoff Hutcher & Citron memo.
The problem with that argument? The RIT “study” wasn’t a peer reviewed scientific paper, but rather an article written by the RIT communications department describing a class project by undergraduate and masters cybersecurity students. Appel, the Princeton professor, said that the memo presenting the study as the work of RIT itself was a “gross distortion.”
“But that’s all that they’ve got. There is no respectable scientific study that claims that this machine is secure,” he added.
An assist from the NAACP
Election Systems & Software had good reason to oppose the bill: it would ban the use of the ExpressVote XL, one of their flagship products. But why would a storied civil rights organization oppose a bill to bolster election security?
Some observers floated one possible answer: Former Assemblymember Keith Wright, a top lobbyist at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, is alongtimeDukesally.
Neither the New York NAACP nor the national organization responded to questions for this article. Nor did Davidoff Hutcher & Citron.
Duke’s position is at odds with those of other civil rights groups that have weighed in on the bill—and even other chapters of the NAACP.
Two years ago, the North Carolina NAACP sued nearly two dozen counties in the state in an attempt to stop them from using Election Systems & Software’s ExpressVote, a similar machine to the ExpressVote XL, in the 2020 election.
The suit alleged that the ExpressVote is an “insecure, unreliable, and unverifiable machine that threatens the integrity of North Carolina’s elections,” and argued that voters forced to use them would be at higher risk of having their votes miscounted than voters who used hand-marked ballots.
The suit was later voluntarily withdrawn at the request of the national NAACP organization, who worried that it could appear to lend credence to former President Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election was stolen, according to Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, who was president of the North Carolina NAACP when the suit was filed.
But Spearman, who now runs a social services nonprofit, remains opposed to the ExpressVote XL machines, he told New York Focus.
“I was very concerned when I heard that Ms. [Hazel] Dukes over in New York had done what she did” in support of the ExpressVote XL machines, he said.
“I agree wholeheartedly with those who have scientific evidence that these machines are not secure, and I think that it’s appalling that some folks who are out there as civil rights warriors would fail to see that,” he added.
During the final days of the legislative session, other civil rights groups publicly expressed support for the bill, like the Center for Law and Social Justice, a Black civic engagement organization based out of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.
“Our concern is ensuring the interests of Black voters and that’s why we supported this legislation,” Lurie Daniel Favors, the executive director of the Center, told New York Focus. “Black voters in particular are targeted with disinformation campaigns to an extraordinary degree. It is vitally important that our communities have access and the ability to vote on machines that they can be confident in.”
But support from the Center and other racial justice groups, like the Center For Common Ground, wasn’t enough to overcome the NAACP’s opposition. As long as the NAACP remained opposed, Walker was unwilling to let the bill move forward, the documents reviewed by New York Focus showed.
When it became clear to supporters that Walker was unlikely to allow the bill to move forward, they tried to route the bill through a different committee. This is a common Albany strategy: when a bill isn’t advancing, legislators or advocates can ask the Assembly speaker to send the bill to the Ways and Means or Rules Committees instead.
On May 27, five members of the Election Law committee had sent the speaker a letter reiterating their support for the bill, and asking him to reroute it through the Rules Committee.
“The integrity of elections in the United States, and New York, can accommodate no room for error,” the letter read, warning that failing to pass the bill could lead to unsecure voting machines being “used for many years to come in subsequent elections.”
But the documents reviewed by New York Focus indicate that without Walker’s support, Heastie was unwilling to bring the bill to the floor. The legislative session ended in early June, and with it, all realistic hope of the bill passing into law this year.
This bill wasn’t the only one to languish in the Assembly Election Law committee during this year’s legislative session. The Assembly also failed to advance a package of bills to professionalize the scandal– and nepotism-plagued New York City Board of Elections, most of which passed the full Senate with large majorities in support, but then died in Walker’s committee without receiving a vote.
This article has been corrected to note that nearly half, not a majority, of Assembly Democrats were sponsors of an election security bill.
Top Election Security Experts and Civil Rights Organizations
Describe Ticking Time Clock for NY Elections
Areas of interest: Voting Rights, 2022 Midterms, Election Security
Leaders and Experts letters
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Civil Rights Leaders Pg 3
Experts Letter Pg 1
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Experts Letter Pg 4
Experts Letter Pg 5
New York City – May 23, 2022 — Today prominent civil rights leaders joined election security experts and good government groups in warning that New York elections are at a dangerous crossroads. In a pair of letters, they express alarm that a new style of voting machine, called “hybrid” or “universal-use”, will take hold in the state. “Hybrid” voting machines combine a ballot-marking device and a scanner/tabulator in one system. “Universal-use” refers to a set up where all voters use the same voting machine, usually a touchscreen ballot-marking device. Both types are in the process of being approved by the New York State Board of Elections, and they often do not offer a hand-marked paper ballot option.
These voting machines have other worrisome features, such as counting votes with barcodes. In the letter, experts say that using barcodes to count votes makes it “impossible for the voter to verify who they voted for.”
The letters caution that these machines will change New York’s entire way of voting, undermine confidence, and vastly increase election budgets. They warn of longer lines to vote, because when “everyone votes on the ballot-marking device … everyone waits longer.” They recommend lawmakers take action to protect New York voters by immediately passing two bills updating New York’s election security laws, which have not had an overhaul since 2008. The recommended bills are NY A1115C/S309B and A829A/S6211.Full release here
SMART Legislation is the partner project for SMART Elections
We have an emergency here in New York. We are fighting off voting machines that voting experts say will change our entire way of voting, undermine confidence, contribute to long lines and vastly increase costs for already strained local budgets. These voting machines are known as hybrid and universal-use voting machines. They are in the process of being approved by the State Board of Elections.
We are on the cusp of passing a groundbreaking bill through the New York legislature that will prevent this disastrous development (A1115C / S309B) It guarantees hand-marked paper ballots and stand-alone ballot-marking devices in all polling places. This is the setup recommended by security experts and preferred by voters. The bill updates New York election security requirements, that have not been updated since 2008. It protects taxpayers by allowing current voting machines to continue to be used and maintained.
Seventy experts, good government groups, and civil rights group leaders are sending two letters to elected officials saying they support the bill. They are asking both the legislature and the governor to quickly pass and sign this bill.
Is misleading & inappropriate lobbying killing the bill?
Although the bill is on the NY Senate calendar and moving forward there, it seems to be stalled in the NY Assembly, due to heavy and misleading lobbying by a firm named Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP. The lobbying firm was hired by a voting machine vendor, to aggressively oppose the bill. Academics have called the lobbying memo, “irresponsible and misleading” and “disingenuous.” Can lobbying firms lie with no consequences? Join us Tuesday May 24th at 4pm PT/7pm ET for an forum to learn how lobbying and corruption are impacting our ability to improve voting technology.
In the Assembly, the bill has 56 co-sponsors, including an overwhelming majority of the votes needed to pass the Election Law Committee (12 out of 15 members of the Election Law Committee are co-sponsors on the bill.) The bill can and must pass this session, to protect New York voters from voting machines that voting rights advocates say have caused chaos and litigation in other states.
What Can I Do?
Please contact the NY Assembly and ask them to pass A1115C today.
Call NY Speaker Carl Heastie:518-455-3791
Call NY Assembly Member & Chair of the Election Law Committee Latrice Walker: 518-455-4466 or 718.342.1256
The bill will establish some of the best election security protocols in the nation.
It will:
Ban “bad” voting machines that experts say have the ability to “add, delete, or change votes on individual ballots” after the voter verifies the ballot. Security experts call this design “a disaster.”
Ensure that voters have the right to mark a ballot by hand, or use a ballot-marking device that does not have the physical ability to change the vote on a paper ballot.
Ensure that voters can truly verify their choices by preventing the use of barcodes to count votes on ballots.
Smart Legislation 