For over five years, since the passage of the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA), New York State has been behind schedule in doing anything. Today, we took a step forward.

Under a federal court ruling, the State Board of Elections (SBOE) was required to approve voting systems that would allow disabled voters to vote independently. From the list approved by the SBOE, county boards (and here the NYC Board of Elections) will pick a system. At least one disabled-accessible system must be in each polling place this fall.

Yesterday, the SBOE was supposed to meet to decide which system(s) to approve, but things didn't go smoothly. There are four Commissioners, two Democrats and two Republicans. The R's wanted to approve a machine by Liberty Voting that not only fails to meet NY state law but is also banned in Liberty's home country of The Netherlands. They refused to come into the meeting room at the start time of 11:00, and stayed out until 5:30 in the evening, at which point nothing got done.

Today, in Saratoga, the SBOE finally met and approved three systems, none of which is the Liberty system. All three involve paper ballots and optical scanners; none is a DRE.

And the winners are:

This past Wednesday, City Council Member Darlene Mealy submitted Resolution 961, which calls on the state Board of Elections to "promptly commission the development of a Precinct Based Optical Scan voting system that would comply with New York State voting system standards, which would be owned entirely by the State of New York."

Five years after passage of HAVA, New York remains the only state that hasn't done anything about it. Fortunately, we can learn from the mistakes of others; three states, at least, are throwing out their new computerized DREs in favor of a paper-ballot, optical scan (PBOS) system.

The current stumbling block is that under New York law all software running a new voting system must be put into escrow, including firmware and operating systems -- and practically every voting system on the market uses Windows. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to make their OS available to anyone.

So what can be done?