Petition To Save New York's Lever Voting System - Text

New York VOTERS  (Voters for Open, Transparent, Electoral Reliability and Security) Campaign to Save our Secure Electoral System

WHEN, IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS, it becomes necessary for freedom-loving people to stand up to their governments when their governments act in opposition to their constitutional rights and in a manner corrosive to their sovereignty, a decent Respect to the Opinions of the Nation requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to take this position.

 WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, that all People are created equal, that they are born with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among People, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

 OUR GOVERNMENTS HAVE TURNED AGAINST THE PEOPLE, in enacting or approving of laws which deprive the People of our constitutionally protected right to vote.  The right to vote is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To deprive a person of this right is to reduce one to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another.

 NEW YORK’S CONSTITUTION has been interpreted by the highest court in the State as recognizing that essential to the express right to vote and the express right not to be disenfranchised are essential implicit constitutional rights, including the right to a transparent process so that the People can know their votes were accurately counted cast. The right to an open, transparent electoral process, which enables its citizens to be able to evaluate the performance of their government in safeguarding its elections, is further protected by First Amendment rights, also guaranteed by New York’s state constitution.

 TRANSPARENCY ALLOWS CITIZENS TO SEE OPENLY into the activities of their government, rather than permitting these processes to be cloaked in secrecy.  The protection of the ballot box and tallying of vote totals must be conducted as openly as possible, so that citizens are confident that the results are accurate and that the government elected reflects the consent of the governed.

 NEW YORK’S LEGISLATURE ABROGATED OUR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT to know that are votes are being counted as cast by authorizing the use of concealed, non-transparent, software-driven vote counting systems to be implemented in the State of New York.  This unconstitutional usurpation of power is supported by the Executive of the State of New York and the Attorney General.

 NOTWITHSTANDING THE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE from dozens of computer scientists proving that software-driven voting systems are vulnerable to undetectable tampering and are incapable of providing trustworthy, secure or reliable election results, the State of New York is forcing the People to replace our secure lever voting machine system with un-securable, vulnerable-to-tampering, software-driven machines. 

 NOTWITHSTANDING THE DEVASTATING EVIDENCE accumulated from the experiences of the nation wherein every state installed these theft-inviting machines sold by the small cartel of irresponsible vendors selling their secret, proprietarily programmed, shoddy, defective machines to run our public democratic elections, New York is proceeding with its plan to abandon its reliable, transparent lever voting system and replace it with the same shoddy, dysfunctional equipment that has been shown to be so vulnerable to massive, outcome-determinative miscounts and theft of our elections.

 WHEREAS THE EXISTING LEVER VOTING SYSTEM PROTECTED our constitutional franchise from dilution by fraud by preventing known opportunities for tampering, New York’s  newly enacted laws unconstitutionally force New York Voters to cast their votes on unreliable, undetectably mutable, secretly programmed software-driven machines, thereby disenfranchising New York Voters by exposing the election results to unseen tampering and known opportunities for tampering.

 WHEREAS THE EXISTING LEVER VOTING SYSTEM PROTECTED our constitutional franchise by providing an observable, open means by which the public could observe and know the lever voting machine securely and accurately counted our votes, New York’s  newly enacted laws unconstitutionally prevent the People from observing how the software-drive machines unreliably and unsafely count our votes, concealing the very transparency required by New York Voters so that we may evaluate our government’s obligation to securely and fairly count all our votes.

 WHEREAS THE EXISTING LEVER VOTING SYSTEM PROTECTED our constitutional franchise by providing the People with reliable evidence of how the votes were counted on election night as well as evidence of fraud, mutable software-driven voting systems deprive the People of the reliable physical evidence we are constitutionally entitled to in order to hold our government accountable and to be able to vindicate our right in a court of law.

 WHEREAS THE EXISTING LEVER VOTING SYSTEM PROTECTED our constitutional franchise by detecting, deterring and revealing fraud, the software-driven system being forced on the Voters of New York, destroys and conceals evidence of fraud, thus providing no deterrence against dilution of the franchise by fraud and further depriving the People of the evidence required to prove whether their consent was reflected in the election outcome.

 WHEREAS THE EXISTING LEVER VOTING SYSTEM PROTECTED our constitutional franchise by providing New York Voters with a secure, verified, accurate count on election night, before exposure to post-election influences could corrupt the count, the new legislative scheme deprives us of the completed count delivered under the watchfulness of public scrutiny, instead permitting the election-night count to be the product of knowingly unreliable mutable software, which is then checked by a partial hand-count only after the election is over, after the winner has been announced and after the protection against tampering provided by the ongoing public surveillance of the poll site is over -- after which post-election ballots may also be the product of tampering.

 WE, THE VOTERS OF NEW YORK, DO NOT CONSENT:      

1. -    to non-transparent, concealed vote counting;
2. -    to having our votes counted in a manner that is so insecure and unreliable that the only way to try to verify the count is by violating the people’s right to a secure, accurate transparent count on election-night;
3. -    to waiting until the election is over before first manually checking some ballots;
4. -    to surrendering our right to know that our votes were accurately and fairly counted as cast;
5. -    to the destruction of evidence of fraud;
6. -    to relinquishing our right to have each and every vote reliably counted as cast;
7. -     to foregoing our right to reliable evidence of the count or of fraud necessary in a court of law, thereby effectively surrendering our right to prove or disprove that the election results reflected our will and our consent.

WE, THE VOTERS OF NEW YORK, have implored our government to uphold its responsibility to protect our constitutional franchise in every manner available to us. We have provided the aforesaid evidence to State of New York, through the State Board of Elections and our elected representatives, the Executive’s office and the Attorney General’s office, but have been rebuffed and ignored.                                                       

WE, THEREFORE, THE VOTERS OF NEW YORK, APPEAL TO THE JUDICIARY, the only remaining branch of government that has not ignored our pleas, to protect and secure our lawful rights, in the Name, and by Authority of the VOTERS of New York, as reflected herein, to declare New York’s Legislature’s and the State Board of Elections’ laws and regulations –  as they require us to surrender our constitutionally guaranteed right to vote and our constitutionally guaranteed right not to be disenfranchised and our constitutionally guaranteed right to a knowable and transparent electoral process – abhorrent to our constitution and to our rights as a self-governing people.

Sincerely,

The Citizens and Voters of New York