| ALBANY -- The state and federal government will be in court Thursday, when a federal judge could determine the fate of New York's voting system.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state in March 2006 because it was the only state that had not complied with the Help America Vote Act -- a law enacted after the messy 2000 presidential election that requires up-to-date, accessible voting machines.
The state has submitted two different plans to the court for how and when it could meet the HAVA mandates. No matter what U.S. District Court Judge Gary Sharpe may decide, the state won't be in compliance for the presidential primary.
HAVA requires the state to provide at least one machine accessible to the disabled per polling place. New York currently has at least one disabled-accessible machine per county.
HAVA also requires New York to replace all pull-lever voting machines and install HAVA-certified machines by the Feb. 5 presidential primary -- an impossible task by that deadline.
Pull-lever machines don't meet HAVA requirements because they aren't accessible to the disabled, don't create a permanent paper record or allow the voter to ensure the ballot's accuracy.
New York's rules for voting machines are more strict than the federal government's, and no machine has met the standard.
The board has been testing machines to find one that would be certifiable by state standards.
The elections commissioners submitted one plan that says the state could put one accessible voting machine in each polling place by the November 2008 presidential election. It says the state could fully comply with HAVA -- by replacing all pull-lever machines -- by fall 2009.
The commissioner's other plan only says that some accessible machines would be in place by the November 2008 presidential election, and lever machines would be replaced in 2009.
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