Yes, I went to the voting machine certification meeting.
Yes, the Automark was certified. Many auditors can breathe easy on that news.
Yes, public input was helpful–or at least revealing.
Yes, it was a sight to see, but it took a lot of patience. And I am full of reactions that need to settle a bit before I write them up here. So . . . . . . . . . more patience, please.
People want paper. It is clear that voters want their votes recorded in a way that they can understand. A new poll from Pennsylvania has these results:
The HAVA-required switch to new voting technology is a hot issue nationwide. In PA, 11.6% of respondents supported electronic only voting and record keeping. 85% supported the requirement of paper ballots . . . .
Most voters were willing to use electronic voting as long as it was backed up by paper that the voters could verify. A few voters are willing to go without paper, but an exactly equal number want to do without the electronic gadgets and use only paper or lever machines.
This is a good opportunity to speak up if you are one of the 85%.
Email your auditor. Point out this poll and say you speak for the vast majority of voters. The address can be found here by clicking on your county.
The poll is described as “possibly the first poll run by a media website”. It was conducted by Zogby International. They interviewed 850 likely Pennsylvania voters online on January 26th and 27th, asking more than 70 questions.
Note the irony here: These people were polled while on their computers connected to the internet. So they are not Luddites. But they still want paper used in real elections.
The Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines will meet Monday morning (Jan 30) in Des Moines.
This will be the first meeting in Iowa since Diebold ballot counting equipment was hacked in a test in Florida reported this week (finally!) in the Washington Post. Similar equipment has been approved by this Iowa board and many Iowa counties have purchased it.
Tomorrow morning the Secretary of State’s office will announce the agenda and I will repeat it here. The meeting is at 10 a. m. in the conference room on the first floor of the Lucas Building. Lucas is south east of the Capitol. Here is a map of parking lots. Look for the green ones.
I have been told by a former member of the board that public input is very helpful to them. Can you attend?
Update: Here is the agenda:
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Date: Monday, January 30, 2006
Time: 10:00 am
Place: Office of the Secretary of State
First Floor, Lucas State Office Building
321 East Twelfth Street, Des Moines 50319
Agenda: Election of Board Chairperson for 2006
Examination and testing of Election Systems & Software (ES&S) AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminal, v. 1.0; and AutoMARK Information Management System, v. 1.1.10 with Unity 2.5 M-100 precinct optical scan ballot scanner.
Discussion and action regarding application for approval for use of the above Election Systems & Software voting equipment.
New Business
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We are still fighting about voting machines even after the auditors spent all their federal HAVA money because electronic voting is NOT SECURE. This is the first of many posts that will cite the expert evidence on the need for better voting equipment and better auditing procedures.
Today’s testimony comes from an interview with Dr. Herbert Thompson, computer security expert and participant in the Hursti hack. The interview appeared Monday in Computerworld:
Is the security in e-voting up to the standards that business executives would demand in their applications? No way. Definitely not. Five years ago, yes, but in the current climate, no. These guys are betting their critical business processes on software. They need to consider who might do harm to that system. This level of rigor isn’t applied to e-voting systems.
What should be done? There should be much more severe security-testing requirements. The key is you need to raise awareness that these vulnerabilities do exist and can be exploited, and you need a way of measuring security.
Some may think this battle is over in Iowa, but we have not yet begun to fight!
The Hursti hack in Florida last month woke up some state election departments. But apparently not in Iowa.
When it was reported that Mr. Hursti had stolen an election in full view of the election workers, many states realized that they owned voting machines just like the Diebold equipment that had been compromised in Florida. Some of them spoke right up, including Maryland’s Election Administrator Linda Lamone. She wrote to Diebold for an explanation, even asking for daily briefings from the company, saying ” . . .this matter is of great concern to election officials in the state . . .”
What was our top election official doing? Running for Governor, seeking publicity by praising local officials for purchasing very similar Diebold equipment for their own counties. He also crowed about how
Iowa continues to lead the nation on HAVA. Elections officials across the state have shown extraordinary dedication to what was an ambitious project, and it has paid off.
Not so fast, Mr. Secretary.
Has Chet Culver asked Diebold to explain the Hursti hack to him? Have they complied? Has he discussed with them the similarities between Florida’s machines and ours? Has he warned local officials who may not understand the problem as well as they should? Wouldn’t that be worthy of a press release?
The race for Governor of the state of Washington ended in three recounts in 2004. In the last one all the ballots were inspected by eyes and counted by hand.
Here is a detailed account written by one of the temporary workers who took on the task and came away a changed person.
On examining ballots the machines refused to count he wrote:
For example, if a voter fills in the oval adjacent to Dino Rossi’s name, then inexplicably colors in and circles the “R” denoting the candidate’s political party and also fills in the write-in oval and writes the name “Dino ‘the man’ Rossi,” like it or not, voter intent is pretty darn clear.
So even if the voter has technically over-voted, when the voter’s intent is readily apparent, hand ballot counters are instructed to count it as a legitimate vote. It is indisputably the fairest way to honor voter intent. Rossi and Gregoire both picked up a large number of votes this way from ballots that otherwise would not have been counted
His views of current election practices:
On one point, at least, there should be no argument: Election reform, at the state and national level, is sorely needed. We simply must find a way to ensure that no legally entitled citizen is disenfranchised, that every vote is counted.
And his opinion of the hundreds of temporary workers who heroically looked at all those ballots:
I felt certain that as imperfect and messy as things sometimes are, this is what democracy looks like.
If you have ever counted ballots by hand or know of any other accounts as readable as that one, please comment.
Scott County includes Davenport, Iowa’s third biggest city. They have told the local newspaper about their new voting machines, but failed to point out that many of them lack the visible paper ballot trail we need for trustworthy elections.
Most voters will continue to mark paper ballots as before. But every precinct will soon have one paperless computer to assist disabled voters and anyone else who is trusting enough to vote on a magic box.
So Scott County has now spent $756,000 for new equipment–and a new hole in public confidence. That is the real news story.
Iowa’s legislature failed to enact a voter verified paper ballot bill last year because our county auditors opposed it. According to State Representative Jeff Elgin and several county auditors, the House State Government Committee got these messages:
* auditors wanted no more mandates
* paperless DRE machines were already working just fine in Spencer and elsewhere
* the bill “does not do what you think it does.”
The bill had started off strong. Senate Co-President Jack Kibbie told reporters on the opening day of the session that a spectacular failure of electronic voting in North Carolina had his attention. Even though it was 2 months after the election, a statewide NC race was undecided because a paperless voting machine had failed to record 4,000 votes.
Kibbie introduced a bill to require paper ballots be produced by DRE computers. It blasted through the Senate 48-0. One Senator admitted to me that the Senate had experienced its very own electronic voting equipment failure right there in the chamber. I’ll bet that got everyone’s attention. They could imagine how embarrassed those Carolinians must have been.
But the auditors struck back. They employed an old theme in Iowa politics–local control, sometimes expressed as “No Unfunded Mandates!” Kibbie’s bill did not contain new money for buying printers for every DRE already in use. Clay county’s auditor even hinted at a HAVA hearing in 2003 in Spencer that they were jealous that other counties would get new voting machines paid for by federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) money, whereas Clay county had spent its own funds for its touchscreen DREs.
Marshall County election director Dawn Williams told legislators that voter verified paper was a “flawed” premise because the paper would be “produced from the very same software that records the vote electronically”. She said better technology would be coming in the future, but the current technology is “an incredibly expensive placebo.”
Most auditors ran for cover. Some would not answer emails about the subject. Some said they would get paper for their counties, but they would not back any mandate. After all, the chair of the Iowa auditors association was that touchscreen pioneer from Clay county.
Very near the end of the legislative session, after all the HAVA hearings across the state, Secretary of State Culver weighed in. He said the topic most often raised at the hearings was by voters wanting to see their vote on the paper. He called for the passage of Kibbie’s bill, but nothing happened.
The Holy Grail of paper ballot legislation is HR 550. It is a US House of Representatives bill, introduced by New Jersey’s Rush Holt, a physicist from Princeton. The bill has garnered 159 cosponsors in the House. But none of them are from Iowa.
Holt’s bill does more than require that voters be able to see their votes appear on paper. It also requires election officials to check on the initial machine totals by comparing some actual ballots to the results reported by the machine.
There is no good argument for opposing this bill, except that it may require new equipment and more work by election officials. But it will restore confidence in ballot counting. That confidence is now eroding. We want trustworthy elections, not cheap and easy ones.
There hasn’t been much point in hectoring our Congressional delegation about their lack of interest in this bill. This holy grail was in Bob Ney’s committee and he clearly was not planning to drink from it. With Ney stepping aside this week and a genuine scientist in charge of the committee, the bill has another chance.
That means we have work to do. It is time to contact our Congressmen and find out why they have not yet co-sponsored this ballot protection bill. Why has Steve King sponsored a weaker bill? Why are Leach and Boswell both silent?
Put your own insights in the comments–no registration required.
A key roadblock in front of the paper ballot campaign has broken. The House committee that has jurisdiction over our bill, HR 550, will get a new chairman.
The old chairman was Ohio Representative Bob Ney, a close ally of indicted Majority Leader Tom DeLay. With top Republican operative Jack Abramoff about to turn state’s witness, the Republicans are shaking up their leadership. Since Ney was also close to Abramoff and may be indicted next, he is a poor choice to head the committee that administers the House. So Republicans forced him to step down.
Ney co-sponored the Help America Vote Act, which began the stampede to paperless voting and touchscreen machines, a boon to Ohio-based Diebold. When we raised the alarm over such black box voting, Ney plugged his ears. When HR 550 was assigned to his committee, he said, “Let my HAVA baby alone.” (paraphrasing.) Even though 159 other Representatives became co-sponsors of HR 550, Ney would not hold hearings on the bill.
Now he is gone. The road is clear. Start your engines.
It isn’t bad enough that ONLY TWO people want to be top election supervisor in Iowa. One of them isn’t even serious!
Republican Chuck Allison is running–or standing–for the job. He is a Des Moines podiatrist and holds a masters degree in history (yeah!) from UNI. He has a website. But that is about all he has.
Allison does not claim any experience in running elections. He does not seek any support from readers of his website. He does not list a way to contact him, and he has posted no news of his campaign for 75 days. He doesn’t mention support for voter verified paper ballots, either, so maybe none of this matters. If he doesn’t see the need for them, he might as well stay home anyway.
Allison’s lackluster campaign nonetheless “doesn’t expect any competition in seeking the Republican nomination.” Allison is a member of the Polk County Republican Central Committee, so he should have his ear to the ground regarding potential rivals. I can’t help but conclude the Republicans have decided to concede this race. Allison’s main job is to fill a hole in the ballot for his team while the real efforts go to the Governor’s race.
Any Republican’s out there who actually care about election administration in Iowa?
I’ll be wearing my MLK button Monday and wishing my public school paid half as much attention to this holiday as they pay to Veteran’s Day.
If only we voting machine agitators had a leader as eloquent as Martin Luther King, we wouldn’t need all these websites. He was the greatest voting rights advocate in American history, but he was also much more.
Why are there only two candidates for Iowa Secretary of State?
It’s an open seat. Ambitious, risk-averse politicians crave open seats. But they aren’t craving this one.
Here we have a state won by Gore in 2000 but by Bush in 2004. In both years there was talk of seeking a recount. In this state there are 610,000 active Republican voters and 602,000 active Democrats–-a virtual tie. In the Iowa State Senate there are 25 Republicans and 25 Democrats–-a literal tie.
Last year the Governor ignited a furor by easing the way for felons to get back their voting rights. The year before that the Secretary of State was criticized for merely sending a voter registration form to every postal address in Iowa. At this moment a critical election law bill requiring auditable paper trails lies stuck in a House committee even though it passed unanimously in the Senate and even though HAVA hearings around the state last year produced only one clear public demand—FOR PAPER TRAILS!!!
Despite all this controversy there is just one Democrat seeking the job of Secretary of State. There is just one Republican. And the Republican looks like a mere place holder.
Iowa’s nationally recognized voting machine expert–Doug Jones of Iowa’s Dept of Computer Sciences–has just completed an investigation of voting equipment in Arizona.
The main finding was that the ES & S Optech 4C machines (used in Maricopa County to tally absentee ballots) failed to count some paper ballots that were marked in accordance with the instructions to “Connect the arrow with a single line”.
If marks were not dark or thick enough for the machine, votes were uncounted. But the directions did not demand dark, thick marks. If voters used red ink to make their marks, their votes were uncounted. But the voters were not warned to avoid red ink.
On the other hand, voters using the traditional number two pencil may have accidently made a tiny dot that the machine counted as a vote. This dot by Candidate X’s name caused the machine to reject the ballot when a dark thick mark had also been made next to Candidate Y’s name. No fair voting for two people, you see!
Most erased pencil marks were still counted as votes. Those voters, too, had their ballots tossed out for voting twice.
Jones concludes that the machines can count well enough, but they can’t see worth a darn. Wrote Jones:
“My tests identify a clear problem with the scanner calibration; it is too sensitive to pencil lead, yet too insensitive to ballpoint pen marks made in conformance to the current instructions.”
Warren Stewart reports on the study here.
A pdf file of the Jones report is also available.