Iowa Voters

Fire sale prices (see below) did not help Diebold sell its voting machines to Pittsburgh, PA. In January Diebold priced its touchscreen terminals at $2,000 each. It sold the same equipment to many Iowa counties last year for $3,000 each.

It was Diebold’s sorry reputation that stopped the sale. The county council had even adopted a resolution detailing Diebold’s errant ways which concluded that:

because of the significance of the voters’ allegations of Diebold’s partiality, untruthfulness, and willingness to circumvent both state and federal election laws, and because of Diebold’s refusal to permit free access to its source code, Council finds that it is impossible to conclude that the voters of Allegheny County currently have or will ever have the necessary confidence in any election conducted using a Diebold voting system. Council accordingly urges the Board of Elections to follow the clearly and consistently expressed will of the voters of Allegheny County and not consider the purchase of any voting system manufactured by Diebold.

Judging by the news report, the board of elections is paying twice the Diebold price in order to get equipment from a company called Sequoia. They will still get paperless voting machines. Sequoia’s machines are designed to use a paper printer, but it is not yet available, and will cost extra if Allegheny county buys it later.

What’s wrong with same day voter registration? Sen Kibbie (D-Emmetsburg) asked. Why do we even need voter registration? We didn’t used to have it. What changed?

Answering his own question, Kibbie blamed the change on mischief elsewhere. “Chicago changed,” he said, apparently referring to corrupt voting practices by the Daley political machine years ago which prompted Iowa to begin registering voters.

Kibbie is right. The highest voter turnout is in states that allow same day registration. Two of them border Iowa (Wisconsin and Minnesota). Kibbie said barriers to voting should be removed. He obviously thought early registration was an unnecessary barrier for Iowa voters.

This is especially true now that provisional ballots are part of the process. If there is doubt about the status of registered voters, they may be required to fill out a provisional ballot. This same safeguard could be used in place of conventional registration.

Think how much money this would save. Auditors spend many hours keeping track of party changes, address changes, name changes, and registering new voters. But when you get to the polls, does anyone ask to see your registration card?

Senator Kibbie is co-president of the Iowa Senate. He made his comments Friday in Pocahontas, Iowa.

While New Mexico is dumping touchscreen (DRE) voting machines altogether, we here in Iowa are still battling over whether to add paper trails to our new paperless equipment. But we should be aware that paper trail critics do have some good points. Paper trail technology is an inferior fix for paperless voting machines. It is so much better to use paper ballots from the outset. Here is the case for plain paper ballots argued by Heleni Thayre of Boston.

A Voter Verified Paper Record (VVPR) is not necessarily a true paper ballot. A hand marked paper ballot is the highest quality voting document—the most suitable for reliable audits and recounts. A VVPR produced by an electronic voting machine (DRE) is a secondhand document and may not have been carefully verified. In fact it may not have been verified at all and may not reflect the intent of the voter. It is thus inferior for the purpose of audits and recounts. The VVPR of a DRE may not be of permanent quality paper and thus would NOT constitute a permanent record.

A DRE is one the most inefficient and expensive voting systems available and is subject to documented malfunctions as well. A DRE system requires a computer for every voting booth in a polling place rather than the one machine per precinct needed for a ballot scanner system. It is therefore a very inefficient use of financial resources.

It can also delay voting in the case of machine malfunction and cause long lines at the polls. A ballot scanning machine cannot delay voting since people can continue to fill out paper ballots and put them into a ballot box even if the scanner is not functioning.

In addition a Voter Verified Paper Record does little or nothing to protect against the insecurities of electronic voting machines unless an audit is actually done - regularly and as a matter of course. Computer security experts tell us that software can be so designed that the printer shows one thing while the invisible electronic count is something different.

I guess they understand this is New Mexico. For now in Iowa, the very most we can hope for in places like Centerville, Greenville, Hayesville, and Knoxville and is mere paper trails - visible ones that we can verify. If the Iowa House doesn’t act soon, we won’t even have them.

A Jefferson County voter has written a devastatingly good column in the Des Moines Register today calling on the legislature to pass paper trail legislation. This should ignite a firestorm of auditor anger. Will it ignite the Iowa House of Representatives?

Here is an excerpt:

Billions of federal dollars have been allocated to the states for purchase of electronic-voting systems that are prone to error and vulnerable to fraud. This is not the opinion of some conspiracy theorist, but rather the considered judgment of computer scientists at leading universities — Stanford, Johns Hopkins and our own University of Iowa. They concur that current standards and testing procedures are inadequate to reveal security flaws that could subvert an election.

Read it here.

Thank you, Carole.

Some Iowans want to reduce voting. Being holier than thou, they would cut out the votes of sinners. No doubt this will end sin and make us all holy again.

Thankfully this self-righteous bill needs the signature of Tom Vilsack, who knows that Many Voices Make Wise Choices. Everyone should vote.

Americans favor repealing the electoral college by two to one, but we have been unable to get rid of it. Small states think the electoral college helps them maintain influence, and small states can stop a Constitutional amendment in the Senate.

Now a new plan to neuter the college has been announced. The plan can be put in play without Senate approval because it does not amend the Constitution. Instead a group of states can give new instructions to their own delegates to the electoral college. The new instructions would say: “It matters not who carried our state—you must vote for the candidate who got the most votes nationwide.”

No state would do this on its own, so the idea is to form a multi-state compact. As soon as a majority of the country approves, all the participating states are bound by the deal.

Clever, I think. You can read more here and here. This should boost turnout everywhere.

Governor Vilsack really did threaten to veto non-controversial legislation last spring unless it was accompanied by SF 351, a bill to require paper ballot trails behind magical computer voting machines. That confirmation came Tuesday from Dusky Terry, former policy aide to the Governor. Asked for Vilsack’s current views, Terry reminded me that he no longer works for Vilsack but said Vilsack “really believes in it [paper trails].”

Terry was in Spencer at a local trade show for farmers. He and all the other candidates for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture spoke to the large crowd of farmers and FFA students. I spoke to all five of them about paper ballots and gave them copies of Lynda’s leaflet.

Candidate Bill Northey was already familiar with the problem of paperless voting. Candidate Karey Claghorn said she knows several members of the Iowa House state government committee (who are currently strangling SF 351). I also had brief conversations with candidates Mark Leonard and Denise O’Brien.

Aside—Leonard dumped on Chet Culver for taking so long to certify Iowa’s election in 2004. I had forgotten that we waited several days for Iowa to be officially declared in the Bush column. But I prefer delay to error. It is this rush to immediate results that has softened up the public for computerized vote counting. We don’t really want instant results if they have to be undone later.

None of the five candidate encounters lasted more than two minutes, so it was hard to learn what they really thought. If we can get them interested, it should help enormously. Auditors may brush off pesky activists; they can hardly brush off candidates who wonder about the reliability of voting equipment. Those candidates are putting themselves and other people’s money on the line election day, and they want it to go smoothly. They deserve paper.

There’s a white flag on the play. Deputy Secretary of State Charlie Krogmeier has been called for “piling on.” There will be a 15 yard penalty.

No doubt taking courage from my own effort to point out the errors in an editorial in the Clinton Herald, Krogmeier makes the same points I made last week. The newspaper had mistakenly blamed the Secretary of State for requiring Clinton county’s change of voting machines. Since I had already tackled the topic, Krogmeier could have merely referred the Herald to this blog. There is no penalty for that.

Actually there should be two penalties on Krogmeier. The additional penalty is for the mistake he made in his letter, wherein he claimed the new voting machines are “more accurately tested” than the old ones. He should have been present to see the so-called test that Iowa applied to some new gadgetry on January 30. It took me three days to tell the tale of sausage making that is Iowa’s certification of voting machines.

Another 15 yards.

For years we have had this standoff. Voting machine companies submit their products to “independent” testing labs in Alabama that they pay to inspect the new products. Then they tell potential buyers how onerous the testing process is. I have personally heard this claim three times at public meetings in Iowa.

Meanwhile users complain mightily about erratic machines that misbehave, crash, lose votes or have too many votes, have dead batteries or won’t boot up when the polls open.

How can this happen after such thorough testing? Most of us suspect the testing is really a case of “Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.” Vendors pay the inspectors to approve the machines and they get the approval they paid for.

We get the machines.

Now FINALLY someone is doing something about this standoff and she needs your help. She is in California–wouldn’t ya know–but she seems to be asking for everyone’s help. She is state senator Debra Bowen. She is holding hearings in the legislature and she wants to subpoena these testers from Alabama.

Last week she merely “invited” them to attend a hearing. They forgot to RSVP. So did the voting machine companies. She is ready to try again but she cannot issue subpoenas on her own.

So your assignment is to contact the California state senate rules committee. They are generally believed to be sympathetic, but need public support before they go ordering people in other states to come to Sacramento to get grilled.

Here they are. Use the phone, the fax, email, or all three:
*******************************************
Senator Don Perata (Chair) D
(916) 651-4009
District office (510) 286-1333
Senator.Perata@sen.ca.gov
Fax (510) 286-3885 Perata

Senator Jim Battin (Vice-Chair) R
(916) 651-4037
Jim.Battin@sen.ca.gov
Fax: (951) 653-9524 Battin

Senator Roy Ashburn R
(916) 651-4018
senator.ashburn@sen.ca.gov
Fax: (661) 323-0446 Ashburn

Senator Gilbert Cedillo D
(916) 651-4022
Fax (916) 327-8817 Cedillo

Senator Debra Bowen D - She is on the rules committee and
is also the chairperson of the Senate Elections Committee.
EMAIL ONLY
Debra@debrabowen.com
********************************************

You know this will never happen in Iowa. So if you want it to happen at all, act now to encourage these California state senators. Tell them the whole country is watching.

Guest commentary from software tester John Washburn:

The success rate to date of electronic equipment is currently 0% for security testing—-100% failure. Only two pieces of equipment have been subjected to public security testing (the Diebold GEMS central tabulator software and Diebold precinct optical scanners). Both have been shown to have serious,election-altering security weaknesses. This is a failure rate of two for two. But, it is still only two kinds of equipment from among the hundreds on the market.

What is needed is MORE security testing on other kinds of equipment such as a Diebold county-level central scanner (both the optical and high speed versions), such as ES&S M100 and ES&S Unity Server, the HART intercivic, AccuPoll, Sequoia.

These other machines are not more secure than the two pieces of Diebold machinery. These other machines are UNTESTED for security. Diebold’s two machines may have not passed the security tests. But at least they were TESTED. Therefore, these two machines are better from a security point of view. For security consideration, systems with KNOWN problems are always more trustworthy than systems which are UNTESTED.

Thank you, John. I suppose we should feel reassured in rural Iowa. We will mostly be operating the equipment known to be insecure, whereas the bigger counties will be stuck with the untested stuff. Hrrrmmmph!

While Americans everywhere wondered if Dick Cheney was drunk when he shot his hunting partner, the voting machine debate had its biggest week ever. All of the following happened in the last 7 days. None of it was in Iowa, but much of it should affect how Iowan’s see their own election system.

A Pennsylvania court ruled Monday that counties cannot buy new voting machines without a public referendum. The state constitution requires it and the Help America Vote Act does not overrule the constitution.

Maryland’s Governor Robert Ehrlich Wednesday said he has lost confidence in his state’s election department and said the state was not prepared to run good elections in 2006. Maryland uses paperless voting machines from Diebold Election Systems. Ehrlich wants paper trails.. Does Governor Vilsack have confidence in our election equipment? Most of Iowa’s counties have equipment just like Maryland’s.

New Mexico’s legislature voted Thursday to dump the nearly new magic voting machines that use no paper and replace them statewide with paper ballots before the next Presidential election. New Mexico already had a requirement that paper trails be added to the voting machines, but Governor Richardson wanted the touchscreen computers out of the system altogether. Iowa has many magical voting machines that lack paper trails.

California’s state legislature held hearings Thursday into the way voting machines are tested and certified. Many critics of the process testified. The people who actually do the testing (the “independent” labs that are paid by the vendors) again declined to attend the hearing, thus missing a chance to reassure us about the nature of their work.

California’s Secretary of State Friday allowed counties to buy Diebold voting machines despite confirming that they are insecure and contain illegal computer code. But he warned counties to buy only legal equipment and warned Diebold they are responsible for providing only legal equipment. The SOS said the security problem could be temporarily addressed with new rules for counties and poll workers on how to handle the memory cards that count the votes.

Does Secretary Culver care that these same machines will run Iowa elections? Will he order new rules for handling the memory cards in Mills, Madison, Monona and the 68 other counties using Diebold’s flawed equipment?

It’s enough to take your mind off Dick Cheney’s alibi. Is it enough to get the recalcitrant Iowa House of Representatives to take up the rather tame legislation that would merely require a paper trail for Iowa voting?

Thanks to John Gideon of VotetrustUSA for rounding up this news, as he has been doing daily for the last 15 months.

Iowa has a new $6 million statewide voter registration database (VRD) as required in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Ours was built by an outfit called Saber Consulting of Salem, Oregon. This is a less controversial use of computers to run our elections, but one that must also be watched.

Computer professionals are watching and recently released a report on the risks that go with the new systems. Here is one that sounds a lot like the risks of computer voting machines:

7. Election officials should develop strategies for coping with potential Election Day failures of electronic registration databases.

VRDs are complex systems. It is likely that one or more aspects of the technology will fail at some point. Different strategies can be employed to adjust for various failures. For example, Election Day verifications can be done via any of the following: paper systems, personal computers or hand-held devices with DVD-ROMs or other methods of holding static copies of the voter list, or via personal computers or hand-held devices connected by electronic communication links to central VRDs. Regardless of the method used, a fallback process should be devised to deal with a VRD failure.

Other issues cited in the report include transparency, accountability, security, privacy, audit trails, the danger of merging lists with the department of motor vehicles, and the danger of inappropriate purging of voters. The report recommends that voters who are dropped from the roles be notified.

These voting machines haven’t even been through a fire yet, and already the price is going up in smoke.

It’s the Diebold company that is slashing prices in its offer to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Diebold offered to sell its touchscreen computer type voting machines for about $2,000 each. Less than 60 days ago, Diebold priced its stuff to North Carolina at $3,000 each. And in Iowa last year the price was $3150. That was paid by about 60 counties under a master contract set up in the office of the Iowa Secretary of State.

Diebold offered the lower price to Pittsburgh in late January, saying its offer would expire Feb 7. Today Diebold said they were still open to a deal even though the deadline had passed.

Ohio is supposed to have negotiated its own deal with Diebold that guaranteed the price Ohio paid would match the lowest price paid by any other state. So they may be able to get back some money. But I don’t see that mentioned in Chet Culver’s master price list.

Lynda Waddington of Marion, Iowa has created the leaflet we need for advocating transparent elections in Iowa. She says over 5,000 people have downloaded it from the web since she produced it last fall.

It advocates for paper ballot trails in electronic voting and it was designed just for Iowa. It tells the story of the Iowa legislation known as SF 351. It puts the burden for its passage squarely on the Republicans who control the state government committee of the Iowa House of Representatives. They have refused to act on the bill, despite its unanimous passage in the Iowa Senate. The leaflet names the members of the subcommittee with jurisdiction: Libby Jacobs, Carmine Boal, Mary Gaskill, Sandy Greiner, Todd Taylor, Linda Upmeyer, and Roger Wendt.

Take this to your next city council meeting, political caucus, county convention, candidate forum or county supervisors meeting. Send a copy to your legislators or your auditor or your newspaper editor. Put one on the library bulletin board or give one to the social studies teacher at school and another to the people who run your polling place. I plan to take it to a candidate forum in Spencer next week.

A link to it will appear in the column on the right. Thanks, Lynda!

UPDATE 2/16/06:The bill passed both houses of the legislature.

New Mexico may be about to dump its computerized voting machines and go to all paper ballots. Today the NM state senate passed a bill requiring the change, despite the incredible claim of one opponent:

Opponents also disputed the notion that paper ballots would instill more public confidence in elections.
“They scare the heck out of voters,'’ said Sen. William Payne, R-Albuquerque.

Paper ballots scare voters??????

According to the Albuquerque Journal, “Some counties would have to jettison voting systems that are less than a year old.”

It is a partisan issue in New Mexico, unlike most other legislatures that have acted.

Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson is pushing for the change, saying paper ballots would restore public confidence in the electoral process. The bill was approved 23-18, with Democrats backing it and Republicans opposed.

Meanwhile, the Iowa legislature is missing its own deadlines.