NY: In Defense of Lever Voting Machines

[Wilms]

In Defense of Lever Voting Machines

by Richard Hayes Phillips

Presented to the Regional Mensa Convention
Columbus, Ohio, July 26, 2008

I am a native of upstate New York. I have been voting on lever machines since 1972. They may be old-fashioned, but their durability is proven by the very fact that they are still in service. I am not alone in trusting them. So does Bryan Pfaffenberger, Professor of Science and Technology at the University of Virginia, who was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study lever machines. Pfaffenberger agrees that the reliability of lever machines, which were expressly designed in response to fraudulent counting of paper ballots, "has been proven in a century of service." He concludes that, "the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius."

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A number of unfounded attacks on lever machines have circulated lately on the internet. Most that I have seen are hopelessly uninformed rants by activists who have never seen a lever machine, much less voted on one. I regret that I must respond to them at all.

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I generally make it a point not to publicly criticize election integrity advocates. But these rants are just plain wrong. I have voted on lever machines in New York State since 1972. I know what they look like, I know how they operate, and I surely can distinguish them from punch card machines. These misguided activists who are slamming lever machines without ever having seen one, and who do not even notice when the accounts they are citing are actually describing punch card machines, should just shut up before they cause further damage. They are playing into the hands of a federal government that is presently suing New York State to force us to abandon our beloved lever machines and replace them with optical scanners or electronic voting machines. We don't want or trust either of them, and we don't like being told what to do by the federal government or by people who don't know what they are talking about.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/In-Defense-of-Levers-by-Richard-Hayes-Phil-080727-985.html


Thanks to helderheid for finding and posting this article.

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