The grassroots citizen auditor group New York Citizens Audit (NYCA) has led an active campaign at our Capitol in Albany since January 2023.
In a series of outreach events, NYCA came with the intent to educate our legislators about the group’s findings, as reported in “New York’s 2020 General Election: A Study in Deficits.”
NYCA volunteers have invested thousands of hours into the report, including professionals in data analysis, computer science, accounting and auditing, among countless other trades. The Director of Research, who uncovered hidden algorithms in the NYSVoter database, was recently published in a major scientific journal. His peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Information Warfare, “The Caesar Cipher and Stacking the Deck in New York State Voter Rolls,” has validated the conclusion reached by NYCA – The NYSVoter Rolls have been breached.
On January 24th this year, a copy of this comprehensive report was delivered to 89 members of the New York State Assembly. Follow-up calls and emails continued throughout the next three months, in an effort to arrange a presentation to the Election Committees of both the Assembly and the Senate. Efforts were made to communicate with the senior staffs of both Latrice M. Walker, Chair of the Election Law Committee in the Assembly, and Senator Zellnor Y. Myrie, Chair of the Election Committee in the Senate.
All Election Committee members from each Chamber were invited to a presentation entitled “A Technical Briefing: NYSVoter Type 2 Data Breach” that was held on May 1, 2023 at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, room 711.
Marly Hornik, Executive Director, and Andrew Paquette, Director of Research, delivered the briefing. Not all invited members were able to attend the briefing due to the finalizing of the state budget on that day.
A video of the briefing was provided for each member who could neither attend the live presentation nor send staff to represent them. Each member’s office confirmed their reception of the video of the Technical Briefing.
On May 22, NYCA visited Albany to inquire if any action would be taken by either of the Election Committees regarding the breach of the New York State Voter rolls. The senior staff of the Chairs of both committees did not offer any assurance that action would be taken. It must be noted that the Legislative Session ends on June 8.
The next question that must be asked is, “Why?” The Attorney General, Department of State, State Police, and the Board of Election of New York State were all notified of the findings in May 2022. Despite this, another federal election was administered and certified in November 2022. Now the New York State legislature has been advised of the breach.
The 2022 Elections failed to meet the transparency and security requirements of federal election law, yet they were held in spite of this. The same goes for New York’s 2020 general election, which significantly violated the error rate of a federal voting system, part of our critical national security infrastructure. These laws are made to assure US citizens that our votes are counted accurately and the results are provable. This has not been the case for the 2020 and 2022 elections.
The only remedy to correct this situation, and to restore the faith in our electoral process, is a full end-to-end audit of the 2022 elections in New York State to determine the true error rate as well as cause, where it can be determined. New York Citizens Audit is demanding that the State Assembly order and fund this Audit. We need valid elections that obey the law, in order to protect our fundamental freedoms as Americans.