Iowa Voters

The bill to permit voter registration on election day passed the House state government committee yesterday 12-8, but not before opponents argued the case against it.

I heard two arguments against the bill on radio news coverage. Neither one said there would be chaos in the polling place or that auditors couldn’t handle the change due to administrative constraints. So why oppose the bill?

Opponents pointed at undesirable voters.

One committee member said people should make an effort to vote, not just remember at the last minute. His patronizing attitude would make certain personal habits a criteria for voting. Call it the “plan ahead test”.

Another member warned about serial voters who could roam from poll to poll, registering and voting, registering and voting, registering and voting from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. She didn’t say how this criminal would obtain photo ids (which will be required for same day registration) showing various addresses, but we know one thing: THAT voter would have to plan ahead.

Perhaps better arguments were made in the committee and the radio just didn’t get the proper sound bites. I doubt it. The case for a law much like Minnesota and Wisconsin already have is too strong for the silliness I heard coming from opponents yesterday.

Democrats loved HAVA in the beginning. It was going to end the large number of spoiled or undervoted ballots that plagued some Democratic precincts. “Don’t worry about that paper trail nonsense,” they said. “Democrats will win more votes with new e-vote machines because more votes will get counted.”

New Mexico saw the opposite result. In 2004 they made the switch to electronic machines. In 2006 they switched back to voter marked paper as a way to satisfy the public demand for paper trails. The undervote rate went up six-fold in some of the most Democratic precincts in 2004 and came back down in 2006. Stunning.

Here’s the research: link

State Senate Appropriations chair Bob Dvorsky is looking for money to replace the nearly new (but undesirable) touchscreen voting machines in Iowa. Good for him.

With Secretary Mauro’s committment to getting a good paper voting system, Dvorsky’s money can solve the problem. Just get Mauro the money, and he’ll take care of business. He wisely bought a paper based system for Polk County. Now he will get it done for all of Iowa.

What to do now: Tell your state senator to back Dvorsky’s bid for money to replace touchscreens.

The 18,000 missing votes in Sarasota, Florida resulted in a study of the voting machines that was released this week. It say the machines are “terribly insecure“. Iowa uses similar machines in Emmett, Calhoun, Clayton, Clinton, Fayette, Jasper, Johnson, and Lee counties.

Commenting on the report, computer scientist Ed Felton of Princeton says:

Experience teaches that systems that are insecure tend to be unreliable as well — they tend to go wrong on their own even if nobody is attacking them. Code that is laced with buffer overruns, array out-of-bounds errors, integer overflow errors, and the like tends to be flaky. Sporadic undervotes are the kind of behavior you would expect to see from a flaky voting technology.

Missing votes may be in our future, too, if we continue to use tally our votes on touchscreens.

Representative Mary Gaskill has filed an omnibus election bill that should help ease the poll worker shortage. She makes it easier to send in a second shift. Only the precinct chair would have to stay all day. Currently a majority of the group must stay all day.

Another Gaskill bill (HF 155) allows No Party voters to work the election. Current law permits only Republicans and Democrats to run the polls. Since a third of Iowa voters are registered No Party, the current law is too restrictive. These independent poll workers can comprise up to one-third of the staff at at the polling place.

Update: Photos and first person account of this story are here.

Another Princeton University scientist has hacked into another brand of voting machine. It took seven seconds to pick the lock. Then he wrote vote-stealing software that would run only on a certain Tuesday in November. He said the machine was a hacker’s dream. They are used all over New Jersey.

Last summer it was Diebold stuff that came under the knife at Princeton. Similar Diebolds are used in Iowa.

This time it was Sequoia voting machines. They had been sold on the internet by officials in North Carolina. The Princeton man spent $82 to get 5 of them. Recently New Jersey bought nearly identical devices for $8,000 each. Over 100 machines were sold from GovDeals.com. The Princeton purchaser points out that

He is confident his students and other recent buyers of 136 Sequoia machines sold on GovDeals.com — where bidders also can find surplus coffins, locomotives and World War I cannons — will crack Sequoia’s code.

Then, he said, it will be fairly simple for anyone with bad intentions and a screwdriver to swap Sequoia’s memory chips for reprogrammed ones.

Don’t tear your hair out just yet: I’ve only told half the story.

The other half is an allegation that NJ never tests its voting machines, despite state law saying they must do so. New Jersey law is remarkably like Iowa law. Three examiners (same as in Iowa) get paid $150 each (same as in Iowa) by the voting machines company (same as in Iowa) to examine the machine for compliance with vague criteria (same as in Iowa).

Have no faith in paperless voting machines. No one is minding the store.

Thanks to John Gideon of Voter’s Unite for calling attention to this NJ story. John’s been doing this sort of work for two or three years now. He is one of my main tipsters.

Iowa City state senator Joe Bolkom wants high school seniors to vote for school board. He has introduced a bill to expand the franchise in the board elections that occur in September. The age would drop from 18 to 17.

The bill can be read here: SF 104

Would this help get youngsters to vote? Maybe if the polling place is in the school lobby. Or if the students personally know the candidates. But in Pocahontas county many school board races are uncontested and even the adults don’t vote.

Still, it’s a nice gesture. What voter knows the state of the local school better than a senior class member? I support this bill.

Iowa’s election director Sandy Steinbach has been contradicted in a report to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The report resulted in the exclusion of Ciber laboratory from its previous role as an independent testing authority(ITA) dealing in voting machines. Ciber has “tested” all of Iowa’s voting machines, according to Steinbach.

In a January 8, 2007 email to me, Steinbach said Ciber was no longer allowed to test voting machines merely because some administrative hurdles had not been cleared. She wrote:

Ciber applied for EAC certification. The reason that the Ciber did not receive EAC certification was the administrative requirements. Ciber’s technical capability is not in question. You can verify this by calling Brian Hancock at the EAC.

But the newly released report says Ciber’s technical capability is in fact the problem. It says Ciber cannot show it follows its own testing protocol and that:

“CIBER has not shown the resources to provide a reliable product. The current quality management plan requires more time to spend on managing the process than they appear to have available and it was clear during the assessment visit that they had not accepted that they have a responsibility to provide quality reviewed reports that show what was done in testing. The ITA Practice Director indicated during the assessment that their difficulties were that corporate CIBER did not allow for the personnel resource time for quality management functions . . . .

Worse than that, the report says Ciber admitted :

. . .that the testing for a product tends to either use vendor developed tests or new tests developed specifically for the product – they have no standard test methods defined. This makes their testing dependent on the vendor input and vulnerable to unique vendor interpretations . . .

In short, the feds now know that the so-called independent testing authorites, who provide a patina of legitimacy for secretive computerized voting machines, are not independent, not doing the testing, and not authorities of any sort. We critics have been saying that for years. Give us ten more points. Score now at 193-0.

The report had not been made public when Steinbach wrote her email. It became public when New York officials threatened to subpoena it.

The most puzzling part of this report is its reporter, Steve Freeman. He once served under Sandy Steinbach when they both dealt with the ITAs for the National Association of State Election Directors(NASED). Why is Freeman criticizing Ciber now after years of accepting their work at face value? Perhaps Steinbach has already explained. In her email she lamented:

Our reviewers spent literally thousands of unpaid hours and accomplished a great improvement in the quality of voting system reliability. . . .Did we have the formidable resources now in the hands of the EAC? No. Given what we had to work with the NASED program accomplished a great deal. It was not perfect. NASED, fully recognizing our own limitations (no budget or paid staff, with voluntary standards that we had to beg for years to have updated, neither the authority nor the resources to go in and audit the labs) worked for many years to gain federal interest in the voting system testing process.

So Ciber was the wizard of Oz, hiding behind a curtain of proprietary secrecy, doing wonderful things for vendors and fooling the NASED volunteers, including Steinbach. I wonder if she feels betrayed.

In light of the increase in contested elections since 2000:

* the 18,000 missing votes in Sarasota, Florida in 2006
* the decertification of the lab that “tested” a majority of US voting machines
* the conviction of two Ohio election officials for rigging the 2004 presidential recount

concerned citizens are questioning the integrity of our voting systems.

A recent recommendation released by the National Election Data Archive (NEDA) suggests that a system for election audits may be the solution to ensuring the integrity of election outcomes.

NEDA’s new paper provides a small table to look up the margin between the leading candidates to find a percentage and a minimum election audit amount that would ensure that election outcomes are accurate.

For example, if we wanted to audit the Boswell-Lamberti election, the table says we would have to hand count the ballots in 6 precincts because the margin of victory was just over 5%.

There are two problems with this. First, some counties in the district are unauditable since their voting machines leave no paper trail. We know how to fix that, don’t we?

Second, the NEDA formula is so simple that it might miss some manipulated precinct results–even missing enough mischief that we have only a low degree of confidence that our audit has been effective. For example, the NEDA paper assumes 440 precincts in a Congressional district, whereas the Des Moines area district has only 330.

There are other formulas for selecting the number of precincts to audit, and I’ll look into them later. For now remember that getting a paper trail is only the first step if we want to guarantee election returns that are counted by software. Auditing is the second step. We need both.

If you can handle some math or like colorful tables, you might want to examine the NEDA paper.