Shakedown afflicts machines for people with disabilities.
Some voters had trouble voting with a Sequoia electronic voting machine at the polling place at Titus Towers on Plain Street today.

The removals, in which people are purged because they've died or moved from their listed address or simply become inactive, may be the largest sweep of registration records in recent memory, according to an elections watchdog.
"There's really for the first time a wholesale statewide effort going on to remove voters from the rolls," said Bo Lipari, director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, a group which is policing the state's halting efforts to modernize voting machines.

The two systems undergoing testing for use in 2009 are showing large numbers of defects against New York requirements, have as yet unresolved design and manufacturing issues, and during the initial stages of my source code review I found a software back door that would allow a rogue program to load from an inserted memory card. What’s not to like?

...that Sequoia Voting Systems has delivered to the state so far -- machines that are slated to be used by dozens of counties in the state's September 9 primary and November 4 presidential election.
Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, expressed frustration with the vendor, saying it appeared that Sequoia was using the state's acceptance testing process to find problems with its machines in lieu of a sound quality-control process.

The search for reliable machines has been frustrating, especially in New York. A politically driven Board of Elections and a dysfunctional Legislature have been so slow to agree on new voting machines that the state came close to losing millions of dollars in federal funds.

userfiles/NY Proposed Brief.pdf

 

These dinosaurs have got to go. But will the replacement voting machines be worse? By John DeSio

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (pictured at right) has published a statement voicing concerns about the reliability and even the potential for election fraud with electronic voting after speaking with local activist groups around New York state. In the statement Spitzer asks the state to implement "a vigorous testing regime" or consider an alternative to electronic machines called 'Paper Ballot with Precinct Based Optical Scan', also known as PBOS.

For years voting machine vendors have tried to keep ballot scanners unavailable to New York. A comment in 2004 to Assembly woman Sandy Galef from the president of ES&S - "New York is a DRE state" shows the presumption that electronic touch screen voting was to be the only alternative for New Yorkers.

Judge Gary Sharpe expressed concern about keeping the case from getting unwieldy if too many parties became involved. The Court held open the possibility that the proposed Intervenors may be allowed to participate later, at a point when a specific plan for HAVA compliance has been proposed.