A group of New Yorkers are fighting a U.S. Department of Justice proposal that would have federal courts decide on voting machine selection for the 2008 presidential election.

New York City council member Simcha Felder and the New York Public Interest Research Group protested the proposal on the steps of City Hall Thursday afternoon.

"DOJ's running roughshod over New York," Neal Rosenstein, election specialist for NYPIRG, said in a prepared statement. "They seem unconcerned about the chaos and confusion a full-scale replacement of our lever machines could mean in the upcoming presidential election less than a year away. To make matters worse, DOJ is insisting that we use weak voting machine standards that are more than 5 years old. Who in their right mind would want to buy a 5-year-old computer that's been shown to be hackable and insecure when they could get a newer model tested to higher standards?"

The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandated that states modernize their voting machine standards. Felder said that there aren't any new voting machines that meet New York State's standards.

"The DOJ proposal to force New York to use voting machines that have proven to cause problems in other states is outrageous," Felder said. "On top of that, the DOJ wants a replacement of every lever machine in the state in less than a year. The proposal will cause unnecessary confusion and lines at the polls, in addition to security concerns that could undermine confidence in election results."