New York certifies touchscreen voting despite warnings

New York election officials this week certified controversial touchscreen voting machines for use in federal, state and local elections, despite warnings from good government groups that the devices are costly and flawed.

On Wednesday, the New York State Board of Elections voted to certify the new voting machine, ExpressVote XL, following a lengthy debate by the four-member panel. The move doesn't mandate the use of the machines statewide, but certifies their use by county election officials if they decide to use them for future elections.

The approval comes despite concerns by Common Cause New York and other good government groups that the machines are "bad for the voters" because they don’t leave a verified paper trail and are potentially vulnerable to cyber hacking.

Ahead of the vote, the groups wrote letters to elections officials urging them not to approve the "flawed" machines, which they said fail to meet the state's cyber security standards.

"We believe each individual voter — and no one or nothing else — should have control of their own ballot throughout the process of voting," the Let New York Vote Coalition wrote to the board. "As numerous election security experts have noted these machines are vulnerable and prone to error in a way that voter-marked paper ballots are not."

Currently, all voting machines in New York use paper ballots filled out by hand by voters and fed into tallying machines located at polling stations across the state.

The touchscreen machines, made by the company Elections System and Software, allow voters to mark their ballot electronically instead of on the traditional voter-marked paper ballots.

State election officials say the machines — and two other touchscreen systems approved by the board this week — have gone through rigorous testing and were deemed safe.

In a 2020 report, Common Cause NY raised initial concerns about the voting systems, pointing to tests of the machines by cyber security experts that found numerous flaws and potential weaknesses that hackers could exploit.

The report also noted that Elections System and Software has spent $615,000 lobbying New York state officials over the last eight years, citing campaign finance filings. Much of the money was spent on lobbying New York officials regarding the purchase of new voting machines, the group said.

Good government groups backed a proposal in the state Legislature that would have banned the use of so-called "all-in-one or hybrid voting machines like the EXpressVote XL, but the measure failed to pass before the end of the legislative session.

"Paper ballots marked by the voter is the election security gold standard," Sarah Goff, the group's deputy director, said in a statement. "We should not be spending taxpayer dollars on anything else."