Public Invited to Provide Feedback on New Voting Machines
Warren, Pennsylvania – With a mandate from Governor Tom Wolf to shift to elections systems with a voter verified paper balloting system by the 2020 primary, Warren County is in the process of reviewing and selecting new elections systems for utilization in the near future. In order to better inform the public and solicit feedback, the Commissioners, through Elections Director, Lisa Rivett, have initiated an “Open House” event where citizens may review, use, and investigate the elections systems prior to selection by the Elections Board.
A hands-on demonstration of the three different machines under consideration by the County as they move toward transition from Direct Recording Electronic machines to machines that provide a voter-verifiable paper record, is scheduled for Thursday, March 14 from 4 to 7 p.m. in the Slater Room of the Warren Public Library. “I want as many of the public there as possible,” said Warren County Director of Elections Lisa Rivett. The event is designed to give everyone involved in the county’s election process, from election officials to voters themselves a chance to try out all three of the machines and provide feedback on them.
The goal, said Rivett, is to “gather public opinion on which machines they prefer and address concerns.” All of this will be used by the Board of Elections to help determine the County’s new machines. “We’re going to have some way to provide comments,” said Rivett, and everyone in attendance will get to try out each of the three. The three vendors providing machines for consideration are Dominion, ES&S, and Election IQ for Unisyn.
No RSVP is required, and the event is open to the public.
Any questions for the Commissioners Office regarding this news story may be directed to Pam Matve, Chief Clerk, by phone at 814-728-3402 or by email at pmatve@warren-county.net.
###
regarding last week’s Pennsylvania elections using BMDs:
“….To that end, one need look no further than the many disasters we’ve been reporting on over the past two weeks that befell voters attempting to use brand-new touchscreen computer Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia last week. In the roll out of the new systems in those states, which many election integrity and cybsersecurity experts warned strongly against, many voters were unable to vote at all. Some faced hour-long wait times — during sparsely attended, off-year municipal elections — followed by completely inaccurate results reported by the computers.
“For example, some candidates reported receiving zero votes at some precincts in Northampton County, just outside of Philadelphia (which also used the same new systems last week for the first time, despite warnings from cybsersecurity experts, and had similar problems.) In a contest for County Judge in Northampton, a Democratic candidate for County Judge reportedly received just 164 votes out of more than 100 precincts reporting on Election Night. In fact, as a manual examination of computer-printed records revealed, he is believed to have received 26,142 votes instead.
“Unfortunately, there is no way to know if even that number is correct on the County’s new 100% unverifiable BMD systems, which are proliferating across the nation, including PA, the entire state of GA next year, and in counties in more than a dozen other states (including here in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest!) for 2020.
“We’re joined today by SUSAN GREENHALGH, a longtime Election Integrity champion who now serves as Vice President for Programs at the National Election Defense Coalition (NEDC). Following last week’s disasters, her group has called for the immediate decertification of the 100% unverifiable ES&S ExpressVote XL systems used last week for the first time in Northampton County and Philly. Greenhalgh explains why such systems, which use touchscreens to help voters use a computer to mark and print “paper ballot”” summaries, should never be used other than as an assistive device for disabled voter who may choose to use one to help cast their ballot.
“What’s really concerning about these ballot-marking devices is that there’s been a false equivalency created by the vendors,” she tells me. “And I think it’s been accepted my many people in the election official administration space, and in the election community at large, that there’s a paper record there, so therefore the voting system is verifiable. The problem is that all evidence that we have so far to go on, indicates that that the paper record [from] the expensive touchscreen ballot-marking devices is not actually verified by the voter. And that’s the critical point.” The NEDC advocates hand-marked paper ballots.
“After years of working with elections officials and elected officials across the country, Greenhalgh offers her thoughts as to why so many of them — Republican and Democratic alike — continue to ignore the continued warnings from election integrity and cybsersecurity experts who strongly urge against the use of such systems, while listening instead to private vendors, such as ES&S and Dominion (the nation’s two largest) who stand to make hundreds of millions from the sale of their poorly designed, oft-failed, easily-hacked, and completely unverifiable touchscreen systems.
“I’ve heard it said that we need a system that the Devil himself could run and you could still trust the results. It needs to be transparent, and verifiable to the electorate. And that means something that is auditable, that the voter knows that the election results are correct and that the officials can prove it.” Greenhalgh argues. “There’s no room for ‘just trust us’ in this. We shouldn’t have to trust the vendors. We shouldn’t have to trust the election officials. We should all be able to see and verify with our own eyes, through observation and auditing, that the election is being conducted in a fair and accurate manner, and in a secure way. Anything less than that is unacceptable in a healthy democracy — or one that aspires to be healthy.”
“Greenhalgh, who is as concerned about all of this before 2020 as I am, says, however, that there is still time for jurisdictions to dump their expensive, unverifiable touchscreen systems in favor of much cheaper, far more secure, and completely verifiable hand-marked paper ballot systems. She also explains why post-election audits of results cast on computer-marked ballot systems are worthless.
“Implementing hand-marked paper ballot systems, fortunately, can be done in very quick order,” she says. “States have shown us they can do that, like Maryland and Virginia. So it’s not too late to fix that. What we need is the will of the election officials to make it happen, and then it can be done.”
Source: https://bradblog.com/?p=13201&fbclid=IwAR1ORBPwT_–uTmlz0Do6rMGu35F1Qdeb1PSSa-F62uVwFG5b9SxdWeTwKI