VoteTrustUSA - New Mexico: State Certifies Automark - Counties to Decide:
In a dramatic reversal of her previous position, New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron on November 21 certified the ES&S Automark ballot-marking device for use in the state. County Clerks will now have the choice of three systems in meeting HAVA Section 301 requirements – two DREs (the Sequoia Edge and the ES&S iVotronic) or optical scans with Automarks.
Eleven counties in New Mexico used Optech for all stages of voting last year and before this week’s certification were facing a choice between adopting a blended system with DREs only for disabled voters or switching completely to DREs. Now they can purchase one Automark for each polling place (2 in Harding County, 4 in DeBaca County, 5 in Guadalupe County. 6 in Hidalgo County, 9 in Sierra and Union Counties, and several other counties with less than 20) and they will be both HAVA compliant and will be able to meet the state’s requirement for a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) in 2007.
An article in the Albuquerque Journal notes that the certification was certain to please disability advocacy organizations, “who picked the AutoMark as their overwhelming favorite in tests earlier this year.” The article also pointed out that while Vigil-Giron said the decision about which machines to buy would be left to the individual county clerks, so far the only machine that complies with the state’s VVPAT requirement is the AutoMark.
New Mexico’s omnibus election reform bill (S. 678) that was signed my the Governor last May establishes a requirement for a voter verified paper audit trail and specifies that in the case of inconsistencies between totals derived from the VVPR and electronic tabulation, the VVPR will be considered the true and correct record of the voter's vote. The two VVPAT options that are available for counties in New Mexico do not allow a disabled voter to verify the paper record - the audio stream used by the Edge with the VeriVote printer (and most likely the iVotronic printer as well) comes directly from the DRE and is the same data stream used during the rest of the audio voting. By contrast, in the case of the Automark, since there is only one record of the vote (the oprical scan ballot electronically marked by the machine) the disabled voter is in fact verifying the VVPR.
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