Pottawattamie Gets Open Records Request
Pottawattamie County has received an open records (Iowa Code Chapter 22) request regarding its erroneous early election returns for the June 6 primary. You may recall that county auditor Marilyn Jo Drake didn’t believe the numbers reported by her voting machines, so she counted all the ballots by hand the next day. She thus proved the machine counts were incorrect.
This week John Washburn, a Wisconsin software tester and author of a paper on how to create test ballots, made his request for 188 items. He believes the machines were not adequately tested prior to the election. He has requested the election definition software file for each precinct’s scanner, the deck of test ballots used for each scanner, the sample ballots that hung on the wall in each precinct, and the results tape printed out in each of the various polling places as the staff tried to wrap up their work after 9 pm June 6.
He failed to ask for documents that would show those poll workers saying, “@h,M?G@D”, “~onofab!t(h”, or even “WTF?” when they saw the tape alleging that Sal Mohammed had won so many votes in their very own precincts. Open records requests are such dry business.
Drake’s office told Washburn they would gather the requested materials as quickly as they can.