Iowa Voters

Two tireless promoters of paper trails have reconsidered. They will no longer work to add paper printers to touchscreen voting machines, saying that the printers are a failure, too.

John Gideon and Ellen Theisen of Voter’s Unite have posted a statement ending their former support for Congressman Rush Holt’s HR 550, the gold standard of paper trail (VVPAT)legislation.

Unfortunately, the implementation of VVPAT is abysmal. The vendors did not take the challenge seriously and have provided inferior, malfunctioning, and hopelessly inadequate technology to add onto the inferior, malfunctioning, and hopelessly inadequate DREs. Federally mandating this failed technology would be a big mistake. We are not alone in this concern. The overall voice we hear now, even from other previous supporters of HR-550, is that the push for VVPAT has served its purpose and, because of the abysmal implementation, should now be dropped.

They are switching their focus to the corporate control of election administration:

Jurisdictions have become so dependent on voting system vendors that vendors now provide ballots, ballot programming, testing services, maintenance services, and even election administration — all without the oversight of the public.

A shining example of this appalling situation can be seen in Delaware County, Indiana, where MicroVote provides the equipment, maintains and services it, programs the ballots, tabulates results, even counts provisional ballots, and has now asked county officials to obtain a release from all candidates saying they will abide by the final results that MicroVote reports.

The statement concludes with ten goals for legislation in the next Congress, including:

1) Remove any requirement for VVPAT. . . .

2) Require disclosed source code for all election equipment . . .

3) Prohibit the direct recording of votes on any medium other than paper. . . .

7) Prohibit the presence of any equipment vendor or vendor technician in the tabulation room, . . .

8) Make it a punishable, federal offense for any technician associated with an election equipment vendor to touch any election equipment or ballots before, during, or after an election . . .

Paperless touchscreen voting machines may have come to the end of their road. Next week a panel at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will vote to end certification of them, if they adopt this paper.

A full news story is here.

The effect of the NIST ruling will be to amend the federal voluntary voting system guidelines (VVSG) two years hence. Iowa code limits our voting machines to those approved by the VVSG. So the bottom line is: no more paperless touchscreens. Yippee!!

Currently most Iowa precincts have at least one such contraption. We won’t have to scrap what we already have, but we won’t be able to buy any more of the paperless variety.

Since Iowans are my audience, I’ll repost this from another blog. It’s really pertinent for Iowans who are interested in third parties or merely in seeing all views treated fairly:

In the opinion of Ballot Access News, the only realistic hope to expand presidential general election debates in 2008, is for people to pester the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for president, and get them to say that if they are nominated, they will agree to participate in at least one debate in the general election campaign that includes the leading minor party and independent candidates.

The only general election presidential debate in U.S. history that included the Republican nominee, the Democratic nominee, and anyone else, was in 1992. Ross Perot was included because both major party nominees wanted him included. The opinion of the debate sponsor, the Commission on Presidential Debates, didn’t really matter.

Democrats and Republicans who want to be president will be spending lots of time in New Hampshire and Iowa, during the next year. If, every time they speak to a group of voters, someone asks them to agree to at least one inclusive general election debate, perhaps eventually some of them will make this commitment. A Republican or Democrat who makes such a commitment would gain certain degree of popularity, since polls consistently show that the public likes debates with more than just two participants.

A commenter at Ballot Access News who claimed to be from New Hampshire already promised to bring this up when he sees candidates in his state. Who will do it in Iowa?

Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen has adopted the views of Iowans for Voting Integrity, saying today in his column that the newly elected Democrats “need to follow their party platform and mandate a ‘voter-verified paper audit trail’ for Iowa ballots.”

And to get a really good system, Yepsen’s ready to buy out all the touchscreens in the counties that use touchscreens exclusively:

Getting all Iowans to vote the same way would mean 19 counties will have to scrap their new high-tech machines. Perhaps the state can help defray the cost of replacement scanners.

It would be worth the expense to restore public confidence in our elections, especially in a state like Iowa, where so many important elections are decided by narrow margins.

Yepsen cites the 18,000 missing votes in a Florida congressional race in his case against paperless voting.

Winnebago county auditor Jen Fqelstad told the local newspaper that she’s not bothered by the lines at her polling places. Voters had to wait for each other to use the touchscreen terminals because that is all they use in Winnebago county:

. . . Fjelstad said she felt the election went well, especially considering it was the first major election in which the new touch-screen voting machines were used.

“There were lines, but people have to realize there were lines before, too,” she said before adding that the county surpassed state code for the number of machines it must have on hand.

Under state law, polls must have at least one voting booth for every 350 voters who cast ballots in the last election. Fjelstad said the county had one machine for every 250 registered voters in each precinct.

I don’t know why “there were lines before.” In the past the county had paper ballots. They must have had a slow sign-in process at the polls, or were too cheap to set up enough voting booths.

Turnout this time was 50 percent. Expect longer lines in 2008. Plan to vote absentee or to ask for one of the emergency paper ballots that are available at every poll. Either way, your vote will be on paper. You’ll be protected from the fiasco currently playing out in Florida.

One of the goals of the Help America Vote Act was to end the problem of uncounted ballots. One reason they are uncounted is that voters don’t fill them out correctly or completely.

HAVA said voters must be warned about any unvoted portions of the ballot. Counties bought new equipment to achieve this. Touchscreens were supposed to warn people of unvoted races just before the voter finishes. So why are some races undervoted by 20% or more?

Here is a photo of a Florida ballot race for Congress that was missed by nearly 20% of the voters. I can see why it happened. It is just like the infamous butterfly ballot. The problem is in the layout. Ballot designers don’t need new equipment, they just need better graphics.

In the photo the touchscreen is dominated by the race for Governor and its seven choices. The most eye-catching word on the page is “STATE”, which indicates the move from federal offices above to state offices below. It is easy to ignore the Congressional race at the top of the page once your eye lands on the Governor’s race.

I’m guessing the reason the review page at the end of the ballot didn’t prevent this undervote is because of some similar graphic problem.

Paper ballot scanners aren’t much better. My ballot was rejected by the scanner Tuesday. I knew there was a tiny LED screen on the scanner. I looked at it for an explanation, but the message blinked off before I could decipher it. I tried running the ballot in again, thinking I’d check the message more quickly. This time the ballot was accepted! So I never got to fix what was undervoted.

My wife said she left the entire back side of the ballot unmarked. But her ballot was not rejected for undervotes.

Thus we have expensive new equipment that has made much more work for precinct workers and we still have undervotes.

Some 18,000 voters failed to get credit for their votes in a hotly contested Congressional race in Florida Tuesday. There is no paper trail for most of them. The race has been “decided” by a 368 vote margin.

It’s ironic that these same voters approved a local ballot initiative to require paper trails in the future. Their iVotronic voting machines are from ES&S and similar to those used in Fayette and Clinton counties (among others) in Iowa.

Here’s an excellent account of how this is a voting machine problem, not a voter problem:

This so-called “undervote” raised suspicions among Democrats because it represented almost 13 percent of all people who cast ballots in Sarasota County on Tuesday.

That percentage is high by almost anyone’s standards — especially in a race in which the candidates raised $8 million to reach out to voters through TV and other advertising.

By contrast, the undervote in the U.S. Senate contest in Sarasota was only 1,600. In the governor’s race, it was only 1,800.

Ironically, even a Sarasota County charter amendment requiring the use of a paper trail with voting machines registered an undervote of only 8,885. The amendment passed.

Not every part of the Congressional District lies in Sarasota. Other parts of the district have scanned paper ballots. They didn’t have very many undervotes by their citizens. The Miami Herald reports:

The House District 13 undervote rate was more than 10 times higher than the two elections that bookended it: the governor’s race and the U.S. Senate race Harris lost. The undervotes in Sarasota also stick out next to those from comparable Manatee County, where the no-vote rate was about 3 percent. Manatee uses fill-in-the-blank, optical-scan machines, as does Sarasota for absentee voters.

In a classic BLAME THE VICTUM response, a state official said,

“There is a bit of voter responsibility when you’re casting your ballot.”

and

‘’You can’t really get in the minds of the voter,'’ Nash said, noting people decide not to cast ballots out of protest or because they just wanted to sign in on Election Day to preserve a good voting record.

The local officials are no more sympathetic:

“We did a good election,” said Kathy Dent, Sarasota County’s top election official.

More irony: This is the House seat being vacated by Katherine Harris, Secretary of State during the 2000 partial recount of the Presidential race. No recount is possible this time, so no problem, I guess.

Reporter Jennifer Jacobs has a rundown of polling place news.

This part of the story actually bothers me the most:

“It’s been unbelievable for a nonpresidential year,” said Gene Krumm, auditor in Dallas County, where some voters reported wait times of an hour and a half at the Waukee Christian Church.

Why are they waiting 90 minutes?!!!? Dallas county uses paper ballots, so it’s not a case of waiting for a touchscreen. It must be a slow sign-in process. This ought to be fixed! Shades of Ohio.

And I agree with the complaint about the ball point pens. It is too slow to fill in an oval with a fine point pen.

Iowa has a new, well-qualified Secretary of State in Michael Mauro. He supports paper trails, as Culver did. Congratulations, Mr. Mauro.

The Iowa legislature is now controlled by Democrats. That means paper trail legislation will not be held hostage to Rep. Libby Jacobs’s voter identification mandate.

Rep. Mary Gaskil may become chair of the House state government committee. She had the good sense to invite UI professor Doug Jones to speak to the legislature about voting machines last spring.

In Washington Democrats took the House. The excellent paper trail bill HR 550 can now come up for a vote.

The Governor of Maryland, who wanted to scrap the state’s touchscreen voting gadgets, was defeated.

In California an initiative for public financing of campaigns for state office was defeated, but open source advocate Debra Bowen was elected Secretary of State. That is the best news in all the secretary of state races nationwide.

Citizens in Sarasota, Florida approved an initiative to require paper trails and routine audits of voting equipment. They had to defeat their own local election officials in this campaign.

In Pennsylvania Republicans said machines were flipping votes from Santorum to Casey:

Pennsylvania GOP officials claimed there were reports that some machines were changing Republican votes to Democratic votes. They asked the state to investigate and said they were not ruling out a legal challenge.

According to Santorum’s camp, people are voting for Santorum, but the vote either registered as invalid or a vote for Casey.

Asked if the party would consider legal action, state Republican executive director Scott Migli said, “We’ve got all options on the table at this point. We feel like the electoral system has been left up to computer technicians.”

How right they are. Now Republicans will likely sign on to HR 550. Very few have done so up to now.

Despite the purchase of touchscreen voting machines for the express purpose of enabling disabled citizens to vote unassisted, some visually-impaired voters still voted the old-fashioned way yesterday. They got help at the polls.

A pollworker in the precinct next door to my own told me that three voters had other people mark the ballot for them. In fact the voters were not even offered the headphones that would have enabled them to vote alone. That equipment was never taken out of the box.

Two of the voters got one R pollworker and one D pollworker to fill in the ballot as it was done before the Help America Vote Act. A third voter brought her own assistant to the polling place.

According to the pollworker these voters (elderly, I think) were probably not interested in learning to operate the touchscreen.

These three voters and I would appear to have something in common. We both prefer the work of local pollworkers to the work of black boxes.

I returned to the Havelock poll with copies of the rules on voter identification and found Diebold’s local distributor had a man on the scene to get the touchscreen working. It turns out that the touchscreens are “touchy.”

According to the repairman the program card was loose and not making electrical contact. He said it probably shook loose in transit. He pushed it tightly into place and that fixed it.

He also said he had brought with him a duplicate program card, just in case. Isn’t this the card that must be protected with security tape? How is it that vendors run around with spare parts in their pockets? Do they have security tape on their pockets?

Meanwhile the paper scanner had caused another mishap. A voter had left his ballot on the scanner and he had left the polls. Pollworker Gary said the ballot was not marked by filling in the ovals but by marking the actual names on the ballot. The scanner machine considered it an “undervoted” ballot and spit it back out. The voter either didn’t notice or didn’t know that he was supposed to do something about it and he left the polling place.

Gary said the voter’s intended votes were quite clear, so they put it in a provisional ballot envelope for the county to deal with tonight.

I’m guessing this vote will go uncounted. Iowa does not require the pollworkers to try to discern the intent of the voter. It requires the voters to mark the ballot as directed and no other way.

I was the 9th voter in Havelock, Iowa, this morning. As I was being handed my ballot, poll worker Gary Zhorne said that the touchscreen voting machine was not working. “We turned it on but nothing happens,” he said, or words to that effect.

Gary also worked the June primary (when it was working), so he is not new at this. My precinct has both a paper ballot scanning system and the touchscreen machine to serve handicapped voters.

The poll workers also asked for my driver’s license despite knowing me personally. All three of them know me personally. I refused to show it. They tried to find their written instructions on the matter but gave up and let me vote.

Here is the law

3. A precinct election official shall require any person whose name does not appear on the election register as an active voter to show identification. Specific documents which are acceptable forms of identification shall be prescribed by the state commissioner.
A precinct election official may require of the voter unknown to the official, identification upon which the voter’s signature or mark appears. If identification is established to the satisfaction of the precinct election officials, the person may then be allowed to vote.

emphasis added. That’s code 49.77 (3)

But I am an active voter, and they do know me. Nothing is required but my signature.

I don’t know how to bump a previous post to the top of the page so I’ll just link to it,and remind you to vote on paper no matter where you live.

If you are still holding an absentee ballot, you can take it to the courthouse by 9 pm Tuesday, or you can call your political party and have them send a courier to get it. You can also surrender it at your local polling place and vote on a fresh ballot at the polls. Do not mail absentee ballots on election day.

Polls open at 7 am and close at 9 pm. Call your auditor to confirm your polling place or your registration.

Identification is not required at the polls but a pollworker is permitted to ask for some if the worker does not know you. Many things will satisfy the pollworker: a paycheck, a utility bill, a government ID card.

After the polls close, go back to see if they posted the results in the window.

Thanks for voting. “If you don’t turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.”

In the last few days we have learned how to vote twice (or more than twice) on two different models of voting machines. And Whaddya know! One of them is the dominant machine in Iowa, the Diebold paper ballot scanner.

These two news items pretty much demolish what’s left of the credibility of the new voting gadgets. We now know that anything is possible with them–anything from fraudulant programming that could corrupt many machines to easily understood one-person ballot box stuffing.

Take the Sequoia touchscreen (which is not used in Iowa). Turns out there is a yellow button on the back that can put the machine at the mercy of the user, allowing multiple votes to be cast once the button is pushed. The details are on the internet.

Or take the popular scanner used at my precinct in Havelock, Iowa. Researchers at the University of Connecticut have described a way to cast the same ballot several times. They used two sticky Post-It Notes attached one the other. Then both are stuck to the tail end of the ballot, which thus gets a tail about 5″ long. You can see a photo on page 12 of the Connecticut report.

When the ballot is fed into the scanner it is tallied immediately. But it can’t drop into the ballot box if the voter holds on to its “tail”. By pulling the ballot back out and feeding it in again, another vote is cast.

This ballot box stuffing will work best on that razor close race for soil district commissioner or something else that is on the ballot in your precinct alone. No point risking sticky notes (or jail time) to boost your man if someone on the other side of the state is doing the same for your man’s opponent.

The Sequoia stuffing works best for someone with very long arms. Or someone who gets to take the machine for a sleepover.

So the story of new voting machines has reached its absurd conclusion, just in time for the election. Anyone still optimistic enough to have faith in them should make his case in the comments.

Deleted. Off topic and now obsolete.