Iowa Voters

The law school at New York University has studied paperless voting and electronic ballot counting and has CONDEMNED it, citing 120 ways to compromise elections! The school’s Brennan Center for Justice issued its report this week. It marks the third time this month that a well-established group has warned us against what Iowa election officials do to run elections. First came the LWV, then Common Cause, and now this one, the most impressive of the recent attacks on unaudited elections.

The Brennan Center assembled election officials, computer scientists, computer security experts, and members of the National Institute of Standards and Technology for a year long investigation. After discerning 120 ways to disrupt voting when electronic equipment is used, they named the easiest way: mess with the software, either before or after the machines are sold to the counties. It is the easiest because it takes only one person to pull it off.

It is even easier to do when the machines are set up for wireless communication, as they sometimes are.

But there is hope. The Brennan report (which is easy to read, I recommend it) says simple, cheap steps can go a long ways to mitigate the danger. Unfortunately hardly any jurisdiction takes all the steps and many jurisdictions have not implemented any of the safeguards.

First they say to use paper. Then they say to look at the paper by conducting random audits after the election.

Get rid of the wireless components in these voting machines, and have a plan of action when evidence of fraud or error appears.

Pottawattamie County showed how that last one works. Iowa also gets one recommendation right: Keep election administration de-centralized to frustrate fraudsters and dilute errors.

Two Iowans are cited in the Brennan study. Doug Jones of the U of Iowa is a familiar figure, one of the nation’s premier voting machine experts and a computer scientist. Patrick Gill, Woodbury county auditor, was one of the local officials surveyed by the Center.

Here is hard-hitting coverage that pins some blame on the new federal Election Assistance Commission, a group with its head in the sand. (Voting machines companies supply the sand.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 1:46 pm and is filed under News, Why We Fight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.