Iowa Voters

Many new voting machines that will be used in our June primary are being made in China, according to this Financial Times story:

One problem is that many of the new voting machines that will be deployed are arriving from offshore manufacturing sites – mainly China – and are being rushed into service without adequate quality controls, says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a voting consultancy firm.

All Iowa’s new machines come from either Diebold or ES & S. Last summer Diebold bragged that its machines were made in North Carolina:

Diebold Election Systems is the only election system company that manufactures its products in its own manufacturing facilities in the United States. In fact, jurisdictions in North Carolina have a special benefit when working with Diebold Election Systems because their voting systems are manufactured in their own backyard, Lexington, North Carolina.

Another company called Sequoia also claims to make its stuff stateside (in New Jersey).

These three companies sold the vast majority of new equipment being deployed this year, so it must be ES & S that is importing its products.

These Iowa counties will use ES & S machines.

If you live in one of these counties, you can look for the Made in China label when you vote.

China: Exporting its democracy.

The platform committee of the fourth district democratic party had the paperless voting question before them and got rolled. They backed away from the clear language adopted statewide in 2004 when the platform said

We support · Using only paper ballots tallied by electronic scan machines;

This time the platform writers were faced with a Pocahontas county resolution for

*voter-verified paper,
*open source computer code for electronic vote counting, and
*a required random audit of some precincts just to see that the computers and the people had done things properly.

The platform that came before the convention on Saturday omitted the audit idea, and blurred the other two ideas into a worthless plank.

The new fourth district plank calls only for “reviewable” computer code and “independent” methods of recording the votes. Apologists for paperless voting can already claim these goals are met, so we have a weaker plank than last year.

The new plank is weak in that it fails to say who can review the code. Since vendors already hire “independent” testing labs to “review” the software, they are covered. But “Whoever pays the piper calls the tune” and “We get what we pay for,” and other cliches probably apply here. How about “Caveat Emptor!”

Moving on to the requirement that votes be recorded in an independent manner— What does that mean? Barcodes? Two hard drives in the computer? Two databases?

This is OBVIOUSLY an attempt to avoid voter verified paper ballots. Who was on that platform committee anyway?

I could have raised the issue if I had seen the platform plank coming, but I did not know until too late. Yesterday I wrote a long snail mail to a state platform committee member. In fact, the only two platform writers that I know do not have home computers. It is pretty hard to keep up with this issue without the world wide web.