The Independent View: NY Overvote Issue Update

In February of 2010 I viewed a archived video of the New York State Board of Elections' meeting. During that meeting I was shocked to find out the board had programmed the new optical scanner voting equipment to not notify the voter of overvotes, ballots on which voters had filled in two ovals for the same race. Such multiple voting was impossible with the old mechanical voting machines. You could not pull the lever and record your vote if you had flicked two switches in a race.

Numerous voting watchdog groups urged the state board to program scanners so they would spit back a ballot with any type of overvote, clearly alerting a voter of the need to make a fix. This was rejected. Instead, the board set the scanners to display a confusing message informing voters they had overvoted and actually enticed people to submit the invalid ballots without telling them those ballots would not be counted.

The Brennan Center at NYU Law School sued, with support of local community organizations and minor parties, before the election to prevent mass disenfranchisement. The board forged ahead nonetheless. Now, the suit has begun to reveal how often voters cast invalid ballots. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers who went to the polls in 2010 were disenfranchised thanks to the the State Board of Elections.

Partial results have discovered 50,000 votes that were invalidated, with more to come. Even getting the data was difficult because half the local boards across the state didn’t have the information. As for the New York City board, thy lost the overvote data for 56% of the election districts in Brooklyn and Queens.

Clarity in the voting booth is critical to credible elections. So, too, a full count of votes. New York’s Board of Elections is delivering neither, and it’s offering only an inadequate fix, such as modifying the confusing message on the scanners to at least say the ballot won’t count. But they’re not sure they can even put that minimal change into place by the 2012 election, now a year away.

The BOE has now said they will fix it. But with all the budget cuts and attrition, at a later meeting admitted it might not get any changes tested and verified by an outside testing center in time for 2012 elections.