The Iowa Democratic Party lives and dies by its absentee ballot campaign. Iowans had best take notice of the latest absentee ballot investigation in New York. Politicians are being investigated for filing phony applications for absentee ballots and using them to win an election.
The story is here.
The 2002 Help America Vote Act sent $30 million to Iowa for new voting equipment, training, and voter education. Now a federal audit at the Election Assistance Commission says less than 2% of the money was not spent according to Hoyle. Iowa must reimburse itself this money–some $575,000 by the end of this year.
But the real scandal was the money that was “properly” spent on touchscreen voting machines that have since been scrapped. If anyone wants to criticize then SoS Chet Culver, it should be for that foolish purchase, taken when the flaws of paperless voting were well known and public skepticism was running high.
But no, that scandal is forgotten. Even the federal Election Assistance Commission, which is looking over Culver’s shoulder in this audit, would never admit that touchscreens were folly. Many states still use them.
This is a trivial scandal compared to the Iowa film tax credits or to most audit scandals you read of. The original audit charges were that nearly ten percent of the money had been misspent, but the EAC has now vindicated the Iowa SoS and has dropped the majority of the charges.
The remaining complaints don’t show that the public was cheated so much as they show Culver failed to follow some rules. He failed to get a competitive bid before hiring a consultant to conduct public meetings and otherwise help prepare the HAVA plan for Iowa. He allowed a voter education project to cover too many topics, some of which are now said to be not educational. He spent some money celebrating the Voting Rights Act and on Get Out the Vote radio ads that should not have been paid with HAVA money.
So now Iowa must pay this money back to the Iowa HAVA account at the Secretary of State’s Office. You see, the expenditures may have all been legitimate–it’s just that they weren’t in line with the HAVA rules for using federal money. It’s not clear which other Iowa source of funds will be tapped for this money. No money goes back to Washington, D.C.
That’s it! No one claims the consultant (Iowa Public Policy Group) did a poor job. Their contract is more than three quarters of the money at issue. This could indeed be favoritism of some sort on Culver’s behalf, so let’s wait to see if anyone makes that claim. I’m not very sympathetic when competitive bidding rules are ignored. Shame on Culver. Had there been a competitive contract, maybe we would have saved a few bucks.
We still would have had touchscreens at the end of it. That’s the real scandal.
The Attorney General of Michigan has ruled that voted paper ballots can be obtained by the public under Michigan freedom of information laws.
A person must be allowed to inspect or examine voted ballots, which are not traceable to the individual voter, and to receive copies of the ballots upon request subject to reasonable restrictions prescribed by the Secretary of State. The public body may charge a fee for the copying of the voted ballots . . . .
The ballots cannot be so accessed until 30 days after the election has been certified. By that time all recounts will have been finished. Only people who want to audit voting machines as a routine practice are likely to be interested in exercising this right. Such an inspection would not overturn the results of a race even if problems were found with the official tally of votes.
The Code of Iowa lists many documents that are exempt from Iowa’s freedom of information statute, but ballots are not mentioned at all. Four years ago the mis-managed voting machines in Pottawattamie County led to a FOIA request, but no ballots were requested. The chance that you may win the right to inspect old ballots still in the hands of your county auditor has just gone up, thanks to the Michigan ruling.
hat tip/Jan BenDor
Three of the four candidates for Secretary of State have replied to my query about voting machine audits. None had much to say.
Even incumbent Michael Mauro managed only two sentences. Mauro said, “I do not believe anyone is against audits. What needs to be agreed on is the procedure for doing the audit.”
But the bill that died in the legislature this spring was hardly onerous. If everyone is for audits, they should have been able to accept that bill as a starting point. Maybe they mean something different by the term “audits” and that’s why they can’t agree. I had expected a more complete answer from Mauro.
Republican George Eichhorn managed a ten sentence answer, but only one sentence was about audits: “The statistical sampling of votes after elections is a prudent safeguard
that should be established in Iowa.” I’m encouraged that he mentions “statistical” as a standard, a better goal than random sampling that has no statistical thinking involved. If we are going to do any auditing, we might as well get our money’s worth by doing an audit with statistical significance.
Eichhorn also recognized that email voting will be a new problem, so that was more good news about him.
Republican Chris Sanger sent the most expansive email reply, but not the most pertinent. The closest he came to showing he understood the need for audits was in his first words: “I am Pro-Audit. We need transparency in our voting system; it is something the People want and deserve.”
Sanger seems more concerned with voters pretending to be someone they are not, or ambitious voters who try to vote in numerous precincts than he is with the votes that are actually cast. These are truly imaginary problems in Iowa.
Finally there is that Republican from Council Bluffs. He did not respond at all. Earlier this year he did not respond to a previous voting machine question I sent to his website. He may remain nameless here.
In short, the candidates do not share the urgency of the statisticians who called for “audits with teeth.” The replies from the candidates are all pretty toothless.
Computer scientists have been joined by statisticians. They both know that computerized ballot counts should not be taken at face value. Someone besides the computer programmer must know what the ballots really said. Someone must grab a pile and look them over, comparing a hand count to the official machine count.
The American Statistical Association on Monday called for audit “laws with teeth.”
Iowa has no audit law at all. The Iowa House passed an audit bill in 2009 but the Senate ignored it this session so it died. One know-it-all Senator said the law was a solution in search of a problem.
I wonder what the candidates for Secretary of State think. All four of them will soon receive an email from me asking their view.
New Yorkers are slowly losing the last fight in the nation against “computerized vote-switching devices.”
Don’t you love that term? I first heard it from a couple of longtime activists .
In this eloquent post New York engineer Howard Stanislevic explains that we could use the term ‘voting machines’ for the old lever machines, but it’s better to call the new gadgets either Von Neumann machines (stored-program computers), or merely ‘vote-switching machines’ if we want to emphasize their risks. And he’s not talking about touch screens which have been chased out of Iowa. He’s talking about the stuff we still use right here in River City.
It seems they had a Pottawattamie moment in NY earlier this year. The scanner was programmed wrong so that votes for one guy were seen as the same as votes for another guy. Election officials are supposed to test their gadgets and find these errors. New York did so and found the error. But they ignored it, misreading their own test results. After the election they realized the returns could not be accurate. Too Late.
As Howard says, “Eternal vigilance would be easy compared to what will be required of us” now that we have to guard against computerized elections being miscounted out of our sight.
New York still uses mechanical lever voting machines such as Iowa once used. They are the only state still doing so. Attorney Andrea Novick and NY writer Ruth Wahtera each have blogs that make the case for levers over scanners. Novick has researched NY case law and believes that spot checks of ballots (known loosely as “audits”) after election night violate NY constitutional law. I’ve linked these blogs on the blogroll on the right side of this page, and here they are:
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition
Save NY’s Lever Voting Machines
After reading some of Novick’s work I came to understand the Iowa law that seals up our ballots on election night and prohibits anyone from examining them until the day they are burned. New York has such a law. It is intended to prevent fraudulant recounts. New York assumed that once the ballots leave the polling place their custody is no longer secure and they can be altered or more can be stuffed into the box or some could fall out of the box, etc. So NO RECOUNTS are allowed in New York.
Of course this law assumed that the election night count was not made by concealed software which hardly anyone present could understand or verify. Perhaps Iowa law had assumed the same thing. Nowadays we have electronic vote counting by anonymous programmers. The election night count cannot be accepted at face value.
I’m getting nostalgic for lever machines. Plus I hear they last for 100 years.
This week a bill to randomly check on the electronic vote tally by actually looking at some ballots (ah–the audacity!) passed the Iowa House without dissent. But it’s already being stymied in the Senate, though no one is sure why. This paradoxically reverses the situation from four years ago when the Senate unanimously passed a paper trail bill only to see the House kill it without explanation.
Meanwhile the great state of Montana on Tuesday signed its audit bill into law. A picture of the Montana Secretary of State appeared in GovTech magazine as a result. Let’s tell Senate Democrats that Mike Mauro is just as good looking as Secretary McCulloch and also deserves to be featured in national publications.
cross-posted at BleedingHeartland.org
It’s just like the federal Election Assistance Commission (created by HAVA) to keep quiet about the bad news, so don’t be surprised at this story. They were warned last month about the dangers of computerized vote counts, but they kept the warning out of the press until McClatchy broke the story this week.
The warning came from the CIA. An agent said some provocative things such as
“I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen.”
He also alleged that two highly publicized 2004 elections had seen electronic tampering–Venezuela and Ukraine. Lots of Americans think Ohio should be added to that list of fishy 2004 elections.
Secret Agent guy says opportunities abound when computers are used at the polls:
Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.
Internet voting was also panned by Stigall. We have all the bad stuff right here in the USA: internet balloting, computerized counting (in Iowa yet!), paperless voting machines, wireless connections, and motivated politicians, I’m sure. I wouldn’t even trust the CIA.
Iowa blogger desmoinesdem has pointed out that only two other states allow absentee ballots to be counted before election day.
The price we pay for faster results in close races will be this: wondering if insider knowledge of the Monday count was used to flip the close race.
Pretty ironic! This whole bill is supposed to relieve the anxiety of waiting for close races that get decided by the absentee count. Instead it will provoke a new anxiety about whether the early count leaked out.
The Iowa House has passed a bill to speed up election returns, as if getting speedy results were the main goal of the counting. The House wants to count absentee ballots before the polls open, something that is now strictly forbidden.
Don’t worry about this affecting the election by giving one side a warning that the results may be close. Don’t worry–it will be illegal to leak this information even though some highly political people at the courthouse will know the information on the absentee results. Don’t worry even if the county auditor himself is in a tight re-election race. Having his staff counting the ballots on Monday won’t allow him to be warned about his imminent defeat on Tuesday. Don’t think that the people who went to jail in Ohio for rigging the recount in 2004 have any cousins in Iowa election departments.
If this is HSB 133 we’re talking about (the news reports don’t give the bill number) there’s even less reason to worry. The bill now on the web says only quite a few party cheerleaders will get to bite early on the apple of knowledge:
The only persons who may be admitted to that room are
the members of the board,
one challenger representing each political party,
one observer representing any nonparty political organization or
any candidate nominated by petition pursuant to chapter 45 or
any other nonpartisan candidate in a city or school election appearing on the ballot of the election in progress,
one observer representing persons supporting a public measure appearing on the ballot and
one observer representing persons opposed to such measure,
and the commissioner or the commissioner’s designee.
I’m sure they can keep a secret, so don’t worry, be happy. Get to bed early on election night. It was a long campaign. Just be glad it’s over.
But if it’s really close, we still won’t know about recounts or audit results. We’ll still have to wonder. So what’s the point for democracy? Early bedtimes? Insider trading?
The Iowa Senate’s state government committee has approved the bill that would move the USA away from the archaic electoral college. I was quite surprised–but pleased–to hear from Jack Kibbie last week that this might happen.
Most Americans think the electoral college is a mistake. Apparently the whole world agrees, because no other country has ever copied this 200 year old method of choosing a leader. It’s really a relic of the free-state, slave-state compromises that were made in writing the Constitution. Until now it’s been impossible to get rid of it, because it’s so hard to amend the Constitution.
The new idea is to sign up states in a contract to cast their electoral votes as a group with all the votes going to the winner of the national popular vote (NPV). If Iowa joins the group, we’ll vote for the national winner even if another candidate did better in Iowa. This plan will go into effect when the group controls the majority of the electoral college votes. Ingenious!
Skeptics always assert that the electoral college protects us and other small states. This not true. Research into where candidates spend their time and money in the 90 days before a Presidential election proves they don’t go to small states unless they are also swing states, such as Nevada in 2008. Who campaigned in Rhode Island or Wyoming? No one did, because they are not swing states.
So far only four states have joined—Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii. These are states that usually get ignored by Presidential candidates, so I can see why they passed it. Iowa has been a swing state, the center of much spending and campaigning. If the electoral college is kaput, we may get less attention. That’s why I was surprised to see the bill gaining ground here. Time to get cynical . . . .
Why would we pass this bill? Isn’t this carrying good government a little too far? (snark)
Maybe it has to do with the caucuses. We barely defended our caucus timeline in 2008 from attacks by Florida and Micigan. We get double attention in Iowa as both the first caucus and as a swing state. If we are generous enough to forego the swing state advantage, maybe the voters elsewhere won’t keep beating on our caucus advantage.
Or maybe we see our swing-state status eroding. If Iowa becomes reliably Democratic(voted for the D five times of the last six elections), candidates won’t come here in election years, only in caucus years. Going to the NPV could bring the candidates back since those many Iowa independents and Republicans would not be disenfrancised in a NPV system.
Whatever the motive–good government or selfish government–I’m glad for the progress. I hope the full Senate approves it, too.
——cross-posted to bleedingheartland where you can post comments.
The University of Iowa’s professor Doug Jones, a world leader in voting machine oversight, has today described the Diebold voting machine audit logs as “just totally nuts.” Diebold machines count most of the votes in Iowa elections. The audit logs are supposed to reveal what the machine has been doing as it proceeds through the stages of ballot reading and counting.
Audit logs came under scrutiny in Humboldt County, California when a public auditing process discovered that votes had not been counted in the official results. Those official totals had come from Diebold (now hiding behind the name Premier) vote counting software. Wired.com interviewed Jones, who said
“These audit logs could give us some assurances [about an election] if they were genuinely designed so that a casual bystander could look at them and understand them,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and former chairman of a board that examines and approves voting machines for use in Iowa. “[But] having them cryptic and obscure destroys the value in terms of election transparency.”
So it seems that Diebold logs don’t tell everything that happened in the correct order, as we all thought a log was supposed to do. Wired’s “Threat Level” reporter Kim Zetter goes on–
The audit logs appear to record only limited types of events on the system and provide no comprehensive record that tracks every event performed by an election official.
Premier didn’t respond to a query from Threat Level about the logs. But Jones said the Premier/Diebold system, as far as he knows, provides no single log file that chronologically lists all events in the life of an election.
Instead, he says, the system keeps “lots and lots of different logs” that appear to have been “independently designed by people who didn’t talk to each other” and that are incomprehensible to anyone except the vendor. He assumes Premier has documentation explaining how to interpret the logs, but says if it does, the company doesn’t share that information with election officials, making independent audits of a voting system difficult if not impossible.
So . . .lots of logs . . .don’t talk to each other . . .need documentation to interpret the logs . . .but WAIT—
“From the point of view of actually doing any forensics, it’s a mess,” Jones said. “Because you have to understand what all of the logs are saying, and all of the documentation to understand what they’re saying are not public documents. I find that truly reprehensible. The idea that you can have this inscrutable document, but that you can’t have any document to understand that document, is just totally nuts.”
I know that Iowa auditors are conferring with the Secretary of State about a weak audit bill for the current legislature to consider. “It will be better than nothing,” I was told. Given the “threat level,” I think that is a pretty low standard for a state that wants to be First in the Nation again in 2012. Having fallen for Diebold’s disasterous devices despite Jones’s best efforts to protect Iowa, we need a strong audit bill. States from Maine to California (literally) are pushing past us.
cross posted at BleedingHeartland. You can comment there, too.
(Update Below)
This fall the registrar of Humboldt county, California allowed local citizens to post all the ballots on the internet after the election. This was an audacious and innovative project. And guess what? This audit uncovered two counting errors, one of which traces directly to the secret software Diebold used to count the paper ballots and has made national news among election officials.
Meanwhile the local newspaper has praised the publication of the ballots in today’s editorial, noting that
To make this perfectly clear, if the transparency project were not around, the vote of Humboldt County’s voters would have been inaccurately tabulated.
This was not a recount in the wake of a close election. No one suspected these errors. The “logic and accuracy tests” upon which all county officials hang their hats had not prevented these errors. As the editorialists observe:
What better way to make sure vote counts are accurate than to make it possible for anyone and everyone across the state to conduct their own recounts, whenever and however they choose? It smells like democracy.
Iowa ballots get hidden away after the election. No one is supposed to look at them while they wait to be destroyed months later. We are light years behind this California county.
UPDATE:
Here’s the site where you can see the ballots:
http://hum.dreamhosters.com/etp/
Further details (h/t Mitch)
http://www.humtp.com
http://democracycounts.blogspot.com
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/Nov2008
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/ourvotes.html
http://www.tevsystems.com/press.html (for more links)
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal blasted the Minnesota Senate recount. Here’s a point by point defense of Minnesota by some who has watched the recount much closer than the Journal has. And btw, I agree with his opening praise for the WSJ in general.
