ACLU Files Suit to Stop Paper Ballots Hand Counted (Will also stop new Holt bill in OH)

[2 Much Tribulation]

A brief article was posted on this afew days back but this one has more detail and covers the injunction they will request in Ohio this week. The ACLU says that regardless of what the HAVA says, any technology that does not give notice of both undervotes and undervotes is unconstitutional in their opinion under Equal Protection (bush v. gore case from the year 2000)

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1200648648154251.xml&coll=2&thispage=1

ACLU files suit to block paper ballots

New paper ballots called unconstitutional

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed a lawsuit Thursday to block Cuyahoga County's switch to a paper ballot voting system for the March 4 primary election. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, argues the county's new system violates the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it doesn't give voters a chance to fix mistakes on their ballots. {snip}


Brunner ordered Cuyahoga County to change voting systems last month after the Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 on whether to dump the county's problematic touch-screen voting machines. As a result, Cuyahoga County voters will fill out paper ballots with pens in March. {snip}

The touch-screen machines alerted voters if they voted too many or too few times in a race. "Such non-notice technology disproportionately results in lost votes in heavily African-American precincts" - a violation of the Voting Rights Act, ACLU staff attorney Carrie Davis wrote this week in a letter to the Ohio attorney general's office. {snip}

The ACLU said Brunner's decision also breaks equal protection laws - established by the Constitution's 14th Amendment - because other Ohio voters will use systems that double-check ballots at the polls. "A system that protects every vote equally is not a luxury, it's a constitutional right," Davis said.

The ACLU filed a similar lawsuit against former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell that challenged the old punch-card system, which also did not tell voters of ballot problems. Ultimately, the case was not decided because the state switched to touch-screen and optical-scan systems that notified voters of balloting errors.

[jimshoes]

1. Is there no way to run

the filled out ballots through a machine that will tell you (without actually counting the ballot) whether it is valid or not. It seems like an easy enough piece of machinery to build. You could scan your ballot before you drop it in the box. Kind of like the lottery cards you fill out.

[Yellow Horse]

2. Indeed there is. It is called Precinct-Count Optical Scan.

The precinct scanner clearly warns every voter of overvotes, etc. With appropriate statistically significant audits of the voter-marked paper ballots it is the most secure system available today.

[2 Much Tribulation]

3. Still a secret count of the votes, paper almost never Actually "recounted"

even the opscans take an image of the paper so-called "ballot" and then count that image. that's an electronic ballot, just like a DRE touch screen. precinct count optical scan just a false confidence booster, at least until we are "all audits, all the time" and no way to challenge the audits legally.

[Fredda Weinberg]

5. The scans can be audited and tested for logic & accuracy n/t

[2 Much Tribulation]

4. paper ballots, visibly counted worked for almost our whole nation's history

now we're supposed to think that americans just can't do it transparently any more and we're supposed to resort to the "modern improvement" of secret vote counting that nobody can prove what went on. Huh?

[kirby]

6. Get the facts straight - your comments are totally misleading...

They are not trying to 'block paper ballots' or 'File Suit to Stop Paper Ballots Hand Counted'

Here is what is going on:

In my precinct, when there was optical scan (prior to Diebold), I would take my ballot to an election worker. I would then stand there, watch him insert it into the optical scan machine, and he would tell me whether the machine accepted or rejected my ballot. There was a light on the scanner too. If the machine rejected it the election worker would tell me so and investigate/give me another ballot. This is considered a 'notice' type system. I am given notice.

My understanding is that Cuyahoga county is using a 'Central Optical Scan System'. What this means is that you simply hand your ballot to an election worker and at the end of the election day when the polls close, it is transported to a central location and scanned there. This means you do not see it scanned, you are not made aware of a problem that you could correct, etc. This is considered a 'non-notice' type system since I would never be given notice that there was an error from the machine.

That is what the ACLU is suing for.

Here is a link to the ACLU Motion (pdf):
http://www.acluohio.org/issues/VotingRights/ACLUvBrunnerBriefInSupportOfMotionForPreliminaryInjunction.pdf

If you look in that motion at table 2, you will see that the 'residual vote rate' (number of votes not counted) was 1.7% when this 'Central' system was used. When a precint count method (as I described above) was used, the residual vote rate was 0.7%.

Since the more inaccurate method is ONLY going to be used in Cuyahoga county, a predominantly black district, the ACLU clams that is another unfair bias. They want the paper ballot scanned at the precint like all the other Ohio counties will be doing.

[sonias]

7. Thank you kirby for this post

I don't like the misleading title either. ACLU is not opposing paper ballots. They are trying to protect all voters. Ohio can shell out the money for precinct based scanners and that's what we all want.

Sonia

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

8. there were no hand counts proposed in Ohio

it was the proposal to haul ballots to the county offices to be counted on central tabulators
that the ACLU opposed.

Their argument - lack of over vote notification to voters.

One could counter that argument by saying that HAVA allows for voter education if there are not any voting machines used to notify the voter.

HAVA's main point on over vote notification: either a machine notifies the voter or officials educate the voters before they vote.