State Never Certified NoCo Voting Machines: Too Busy Plowing Snow?

When Northampton County voter registration employee Howie Erney demonstrated the WinVote system to our citizens' election panel on February 7, he smugly told them it's easier than those pesky levers, and is getting "better and better." But then Erney made a mistake. He was willing to answer questions, even from the people like me in the peanut gallery.

Unfortunately for Erney, I had spent that afternoon looking at documentation obtained from BlackBox Voting. I already knew the Pennsylvania Department of State had reluctantly certified WinVote Version 2.0.2 in February, 2006, noting twelve specific problems. But when Howie Erney confidently booted up his system, I was shocked to see that the system we had used was WinVote Version 2.0.3 instead of the certified version. When I started questioning this, the elections office suddenly didn't want any more questions. Fortunately, citizen panel co-chair Russ Shade had the same questions. And he wanted answers both from the state and vendor Advanced Voting Solutions. "They have this nasty habit of not returning phone calls."

In addition to this software problem, there are allegations that what we see is not what we got. According to BlackBox Voting, machines with identical appearances have completely different components "under the hood." Cheap Chinese hardware may have been substituted for what was approved.

When the panel met again on February 13, 21 and 28, there still was no response from our state apparatchiks. I know they weren't busy plowing snow. Astonishingly, HRH DePaul actually insisted at one point that the state would only speak through her. Fed up, the citizens' election panel finally sent a letter to state elections commissioner Harry VanSickle, asking to see "the certification of the specific machines used in the last two elections. The Committee wants documentation that the hardware shipped by Advanced Voting Solutions is, in fact, what was approved."

Instead of speaking through his oracle, HRH DePaul, or just answering the damn questions, the state elections commissioner ran to the Morning Call editorial board in an obvious effort at damage control. It was beginning to appear that we had voted with machines that were never state certified.

Now, thanks the The Express Times, we know that is so. VanSickle has finally answered the county elections panel, and guess what? The machines used in November's election were never certified by the state. For all the state cares, we could have been voting on copy machines. Let's face it. A state bureaucracy willing to strand pregnant women for over twenty hours on a freezing highway could care little about whether our elections are run properly.

The state elections commission couldn't even be bothered to list campaign finance reports for online viewing until well after the election, completely defeating the very reason for online access. Government has no problem posting all kinds of personal information about us on the net, but can't be bothered to let voters know who is funding a candidate until after an election, when it is too late to do any good.

Elections? We don't need no stinkin' elections!

Problems in the land of midnight payraises extend well beyond its legislators. An arrogant and unresponsive bureaucracy, on both state and local level, is increasingly becoming the norm. Our Lehigh Valley delegation to the state house and senate should be all over this. Why, for example, is PennDot Secretary Biehler still on the public payroll? Why is VanSickle still at the public trough after permitting an election to occur with uncertified voting machines? What gives him the right to ignore calls from a county executive? Why can't he get expense reports online until after an election is over?

Attitudes like these are what make Katrinas possible. New Orleans is not the exception.