Iowa Voters

We won’t get good voting machines until we get tougher on who gets to use them. That means no paper proof for votes cast on touchscreen machines will be mandated in Iowa. Not unless we also crack down on people who vote twice and on the wave of non-citizen voting.

That was the message from Des Moines Representative Libby Jacobs, except that she did not refer to non-citizen voting as a “wave.” She delivered her message to members of Iowans for Voting Integrity (IVI) who sat down with her for a brief conference. IVI is a Jefferson county-born group of concerned citizens. Jacobs chairs the subcommittee of the Iowa House that must act on the paper trail bill.

Jacobs argued that there is no point in securing the election equipment against failure by adding paper ballots because the election itself would still not be secure against rogue voters. So we need to add a requirement that voters show a government issued photo identification card before they vote. She said even her children have to show such cards to participate in athletic events. (That’s never happened to my children, by the way). She said she was willing to put up with voting machines of ill repute until she gets the tougher requirements for identifying illegal voters!

So, Iowans, is this a problem? Are our elections being polluted by extraterrestrial voters who resemble us? Are some of your neighbors driving to all the nearby polls and voting in place of citizens who died just before election day? Does this happen in the primary elections and in school board elections or only in November general elections?

We need to know. Only if we get this cleared up will we be able to require believable voting equipment that puts votes down on paper. You can start compiling the evidence here in the comments section.
If we find evidence, we can convince the League of Women Voters to agree to Jacobs’s plan. If there is no evidence, we can convince Jacobs her plan is superfluous.

Do you know of any college kids who vote absentee at home and also at their Colorado campus? Maybe it’s the other way around: they vote in Ames and also send absentee ballots back to Alabama where their parents live.

Maybe you know people in Clive who own houses at Okoboji and think they should be able to vote both places because they pay property tax both places. Well, you can forget about those cases of fraud because (1) a tough ID rule won’t help catch the college kids, and (2) the clueless in Clive are now foiled by the statewide voter registration database. They can no longer be registered in both places.

We really are down to the impersonators of infrequent voters or of recently deceased voters. Any reason to believe this is happening near you? Or anywhere in the state? Any evidence?

Hours ago the Maryland House of Representatives voted 137-0 to immediately stop using paperless voting machines. Maryland has nearly new equipment that was installed across the state. A TV website has the story:

The bill comes after concerns from both parties that the current voting machines don’t produce paper receipts that could be counted by hand in a contested election. The bill says voters this year will use optical scan ballots on which they fill in a circle or arrow next to the names of candidates and then feed the paper ballot into a machine which records the votes.

Will the Iowa House EVER get up to speed?

Real reporters don’t get to think very long about their reports. So some have already filed the news of yesterday’s meeting at the Statehouse to goad the legislature into fixing Iowa’s voting laws for the digital age. Here is an excerpt from the report by Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson:

Doug Jones spoke at the statehouse over the noon-hour, and he says there are even more flaws to fix. “The issue won’t go away. Iowa’s election law contains these clauses that really need to be fixed. There are major oversights in the law,” Jones says. “The problems are national…the problem is for the state to take control of the situation and do some pro-active work.”

My own report on the meetings will be published later.

University of Iowa professor of computer science Doug Jones will be at the Iowa Capitol Wednesday to discuss voting machines. You are invited to help me and some others lobby the legislature before Jones speaks at noon. Meet us in the basement lunchroom directly below the dome at 10:00 a.m. or come to room 102 at noon.

Here is a taste of Dr. Jones from 2004:

All of today’s voting systems are software based, with the exception of hand-counted paper ballots and mechanical lever voting systems. The correctness of this software is central to the trustworthiness of our election results, and because the current system of software certification is seriously flawed, the move to computerized election technology has simply replaced known evils with poorly understood systems instead of addressing the underlying problems. . . . .
The current practice in certifying voting software involves submitting it, under non disclosure agreement, to a federally accredited independent testing authority who issues certificate of compliance with the current voting system standards. Most states make only limited efforts to go beyond this. Several of us have questioned this certification process for years, and in the last year[2003-2004], a series of independent reports on the security problems of one vendor’s system has destroyed all credibility of the current system.

Iowa paper trail advocates are planning to meet state legislators Wednesday to make the case against paperless voting. They will be led by voting machine expert Doug Jones of Iowa City.

Jones is a professor of computer science and former member of the Iowa board of voting machine examiners. He has consulted with election officials in Arizona, Florida, Panama, and Asia, and testified before Congress.

The meeting will be in room 102 at noon. Please ask your legislator to attend. Please attend yourself! Please come early (10:00 a.m.?) and spend the morning telling legislators about the meeting while simultaneously making your own case for trustworthy voting procedures such as paper ballots and random audits of ballot counting machines.

The Iowa House is currently blocking a bill that would require paper trails from all Iowa voting machines.

This event is an outgrowth of a column in the Des Moines Register by Carole Simmons which appeared last Saturday.

If there is enough participation and energy left over late in the day, perhaps it can be directed to the Des Moines offices of our Senators and Congressman Boswell. There is a roll for federal legislation, too, and none of the three have so far done their share to advance it.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and our Governor Vilsack may both run for President in 2008. Both are now trying to attract attention to themselves. Vilsack has his ten words campaign and Richardson has his paper ballot triumph.

Thursday Governor Richardson will sign a bill booting touchscreen and pushbutton voting machines from New Mexico. All the new voting machines sold since the Florida recount were supposed to reduce the number of overvotes and undervotes—cases where votes don’t get counted because voters mishandled the ballot or overlooked the race. The new equipment warns voters that they skipped races or that they voted for two candidates instead of just one. Voila! No more lost votes.

But New Mexico led the nation in undervotes in 2004 despite their electronic equipment. Paperless machines got the blame. “Eighty-nine precincts had more than 10% undervotes, and all but one of these used pushbutton machines.”

There were also some spectacular cases of phantom voting:

In one precinct in San Juan County 318 voters somehow managed to register 2,161 votes, 2,079 of them to incumbent county clerk Fran Hanhardt and just 82 for her opponent Glojean Todacheene. San Juan County was the first to announce its intention to clear the memory on their voting machines, initially disregarding the legal requirement of notifying all of the political parties involved in the election.

So now New Mexico will dump the suspicious equipment. And Governor Richardson is signing the bill at noon tomorrow. To get maximum attention, the ceremony will be on the web. You can watch it here at noon Iowa time:

www.billrichardson2006.com/reform/paperballots

Richardson’s grandstanding is needed to compensate for New Mexico’s disgraceful disregard of voters’ objections following the 2004 voting and for the state’s failure to investigate at the time. And it won’t get Richardson many votes in Vilsack’s back yard, but it will be noticed in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, where the voting machine story is much hotter than in Iowa. Let’s hope Vilsack tries to catch up with the new Richardson on this issue.