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Elections Board Won't Fix Broken
Voting Machines
Apr 16, 2003
11:30 am US/Eastern
(1010
WINS) (NEW YORK)
The city's Board of Elections has rejected a
plan to repair devices on 7,000 voting machines, which people
mistakenly left without having cast a vote.
Six members of
the board joined together Tuesday to shoot down the machine repair
vote, Newsday reported in Wednesday editions.
The broken
machines are believed to have caused as many as 60,000 lost votes in
the 2000 presidential election.
Several Democrats on the
board, angry with the decision, accused Republicans of wanting to
"confuse" voters.
"The Republicans understand it's in their
interest to keep voters confused," said Manhattan Democratic
Commissioner Douglas Kellner, who campaigned to have the machines
fixed.
The lost votes amounted to 3.9 percent of the citywide
votes in 2000, and even higher in some districts.
The votes
are lost when voters push the machine levers down to enter their
choices, but push them back up before throwing the handle to record
their votes. There have also been cases where voters throw the
handle without pushing down the levers.
Kellner said that 80
percent of those votes would have gone to Democratic
candidates.
But Commissioner Stephen Weiner, a Queens
Republican denied that the board was motivated by
politics.
"To characterize this as some kind of Republican
anti-voting maneuver is incorrect," Weiner said. He said that the
city is only several years from getting new machines.
(© MMIII Infinity Broadcasting
Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press
contributed to this report.)
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