New York to revolutionize voting

The SAFE Act and PAVE Act ride again!

Back in Feb, I published a Washington Post op-ed about the disgraceful legal threats and smears ES&S — the voting machine monopolist — had thrown at SMART, NY activists who lobby for election security and against unaccountable voting machines.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

For years, orgs like SMART argued that the defect-riddled machines from the likes of ES&S were a threat to US election integrity, not just because they were hackable, but because this made it easy for scoundrels to push a bad-faith narrative of a stolen election.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/04/vote-machine-tankies/#ess

Of course, this is exactly what happened, with Trump and his cult taking up a baseless narrative that Dominion Systems’ (terrible) voting machines had been used to steal the election. Far from being chastened by this democracy-destabilizing moment, ES&S seized upon it.

ES&S lumped SMART’s accurate, measured warnings about its flagship Expressvote XL machines in with Trump’s unhinged claims about Dominon’s machines, hoping that the general public wouldn’t know enough about the specifics to tell the difference.