NEW YORK—After seeing low turnouts at the Board of Election’s (BOE) recent new voting machine demonstrations, newly inaugurated Public Advocate Bill de Blasio proposed on Tuesday a community outreach plan to familiarize New Yorkers with the optical scan voting machines.
His Voter Information Plan (VIP) includes 10 recommendations that are said to be designed to minimize voter confusion and risk of disenfranchising of the city’s most vulnerable voters—undereducated, non-English speaking, disabled, and elderly New Yorkers.
The BOE recently held demonstrations in all five boroughs to teach New Yorkers how to use optical scan voting machines, yet few voters turned up. A demonstration held on Dec. 17 in Staten Island attracted fewer than two dozen of the borough’s roughly 270,000 registered voters.
“In order to ensure that New Yorkers vote we need to make sure that all New Yorkers know how to vote,” said de Blasio in a press release. “With elections only nine months away, public forums attended by a dozen people are simply not enough.”
As the optical scan voting machines will be adopted in the 2010 federal and state elections for the first time in New York, de Blasio calls on BOE to include VIP recommendations in their $6.7 million budget for educating voters.
In de Blasio’s VIP plan, he proposed BOE to include a voting machine demonstration on its Web site to allow voters to simulate voting day experience, distribute a graphic mailing to all households with registered voters with educational materials, use social network sites such as Facebok and Twitter to connect with younger voters, allow voters to subscribe to receive text messages with information about voting machine demonstrations, and other means to reach out to voters.
The transition from lever voting machines to a new computerized system follows a 2002 federal mandate under the Help America Vote Act for all states to install new and fully accessible electronic voting systems. Upon obtaining a waiver from implementing the new equipment in the 2004 and 2006 elections, New York is one of the last cities in the nation that have not switched to new electoral equipment.
“As we move to adopt a modern system for casting and counting votes, it is critical that we give voters every opportunity to understand the new machines and to have confidence in the system,” said Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, chair of the State Assembly’s Subcommittee on Election Day Operations.
Friends Read Free