Editorial Board New York Daily News
May 10, 2005

In response to your editorial, “Albany must act to help N.Y. voters vote”:

Your recent editorial supporting optical scan paper ballots misses a number of important points for New York voters.

Optical scan voting systems deny New York's 3,304,827 citizens with disabilities the right to cast a secret ballot. They are not capable of meeting the accessibility requirements of the Help America Vote Act. To meet those mandates, each county must also purchase an electronic voting DRE machine for every polling place. These "blended systems" add unnecessary expense and complexity for election administrators.

For the 2004 presidential election, CalTech-MIT reports that the three states with the lowest error rates or residual vote rates were the only three states that used electronic voting equipment throughout the entire state (NV, MD and GA).

Another recent study by the University of Missouri showed that during the 2000 election, error rates on optical scan equipment doubled in jurisdictions with heavy concentrations of minority voters.

Perhaps most importantly, optical scan balloting leaves us right where we left off in Florida 2000 -- with ambiguously marked ballots that may or may not be read by computerized scanners, which are then left to subjective standards and analysis by election officials to determine who wins in a close race.

With millions of tax dollars at stake, I would hope that after all the debate in Albany we can at least resolve the main issue that started this reform process in motion five years ago.

Jim Dickson
Vice President, American Association of People with Disabilities
The writer co-chairs the Leadership Conference on Civil

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