Iowa Voters

UPDATE–The markup of HR 811 described below did not occur. Officially it was because of the committee chair’s illness. Some opponents of the bill claim it is because they stirred up so much last minute opposition that they threw the committee off its plans. Markup is now expected in mid-April.

************
One paper trail bill passed the Iowa Senate yesterday, while another paper trail bill gets committee action in Washington tomorrow(see below). There is some risk to Iowa in this timetable, as the federal bill appears to ban what Iowa may decide to do.

Congressman Holt’s HR 811 appears to ban the reel to reel paper trail printers that use thermal printing. These are called “toilet paper” printers by critics because of the reel and the low quality product. If Iowa requires printers to be installed by next year, we will likely have to buy the toilet paper version. Then we will have to replace them with newer, better printers to meet federal law should HR 811 pass with this required improvement.

The safe way down this trail is to switch now to voter-marked paper ballots with ballot marking machines for handicapped voters. Then we’ll be ready for the federal bill with no additional disruptions or new equipment needed.

#############
The House Administration (full committee) is planning to markup Rep. Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 (HR. 811) on Thursday, March 29th at 10am. Any letters in support of or opposition to this bill should be addressed to House Administration and faxed to them today or tomorrow so they can be inserted in the Record. The fax numbers for the committee are listed below. The letters can be the same letters you have been sending to your Congressional delegation, simply readdressed to Chairwoman Millender-McDonald and Ranking Member Ehlers.
Members of the Committee on House Administration
Democrats – Fax Number 202-225-7664
Republicans – Fax Number – 202-225-9957

It passed 45-5. It spells the end of touchscreen voting in Iowa, since current equipment can be replaced only with scannable paper ballot systems. That’s good news.

Unfortunately there’s more. The bill allows the new paper trail to be “machine readable” as well as visually readable by real people. This opens the door to misuse of the paper trail, wherein one set of software creates the trail and another set of software reads it. If no one’s eyes are ever employed to examine the paper and compare it to the alleged vote tally, we are hardly better off than we were.

Besides that Rep. Libby Jacobs has filed an amendment to gut the bill when it comes up in the House. She wants to use the ephemeral “electronic ballot image” as the official ballot and ignore the paper trail altogether. Why order the purchase of printers at a cost of a million dollars or more only to ignore the trail they print? The Jacobs amendment is a monkey wrench being thrown into the gears of democracy and an insult to all concerned.

The VOICE bill is in a House Appropropriations subcommittee of Jacoby, Oldson, and Roberts. My apologies to Dwayne Alons for mistakenly directing email to him instead of to Rod Roberts of Carroll county.

Rod.Roberts@legis.state.ia.us

I’ll be asking Rep. Roberts if he supports giving all Iowans a VOICE instead of just a vote.

No reply so far from Rep. Oldson of Des Moines. I’ll try again.

Jo.Oldson@legis.state.ia.us

Johnson county state representative David Jacoby says HF 805 (VOICE bill) is “darn good” and he is “not opposed”.

He did not say he would do anything to advance the bill out of his subcommittee of the appropriations committee, but I didn’t ask that. I slipped up by merely asking if he was opposed to the bill. (Also see comments in the previous post.)

He noted, however, that finding the money to fund the bill means something else won’t get funded. I can see everyone ostensibly supporting clean elections but not actually enacting the legislation out of cost concerns. Jacoby says something else will have to get cut. Surely he means something will get a smaller increase, since the state budget revenues are growing sharply.

I think clean elections will pay for themselves once they get going. If legislators don’t have to do favors for contributors, the state coffers should be easier to manage. Those private campaign contributions don’t look like state money, but they often get repaid with state money–either tax cuts for special groups like factory farms or pork barrel spending like the Iowa Values (corporate welfare) Fund.

In the mean time, bite the bullet: fund the future with clean elections. It’s your move, Rep. Jacoby. Advance the bill.

Readers can encourage him via this address:

David.Jacoby@legis.state.ia.us

Here’s the full email from Rep. Jacoby:

“I am not opposed to the bill. It is a darn good bill.
The policy section needs some clean up (a little too complicated). The bottom line is where to find $ 10 million (at least) in the budget. No proponent of the legislation has offered an idea of what area to cut. The $ 10 m does come out of the general fund and will directly affect someone else.

Dave

And now the BAD news. Two reports in the last two days of Democrats opposing clean elections legislation that has already passed the state government committees in both House and Senate.

First I heard it from Senate President Jack Kibbie, speaking in Pocahontas Thursday night. Kibbie backed the bill but said it had opponents “even in the Democratic Party.” sounding surprised. He didn’t say if they were senators or representatives.

The next morning Ed Fallon emailed his I’m For Iowa followers saying “leadership” was seeking to smother the bill in another House committee. Fallon says a House appropriations subcommittee currently has jurisdiction. It has only three members–David Jacoby, Jo Oldson and Dwayne Alons.

Will they do the dirty deed? Do they themselves oppose the bill? I plan to ask them. If you ask–if they answer you–let me know.

David.Jacoby@legis.state.ia.us
Jo.Oldson@legis.state.ia.us
Dwayne.Alons@legis.state.ia.us

The Iowa legislature is about to take up a bill that will force counties to phase out touchscreen voting machines(DREs). The bill got some support this month from two disabilities groups.

The Massachusetts Disability Law Center applauded their state’s decision not to buy touchscreens and called for

common ground between the disability rights community and the growing number of citizens who are concerned that many of the proposed new technologies are subject to tampering and error, . .

And Bradblog reports an ad hoc group has told Congress to immediately ban DREs because DREs

have quickly proven to be neither fully accessible to all voters nor secure and accurate methods of recording, tallying, and reporting votes. While the goal of private voting has been achieved by some voters, this has often been without meaningful assurance that our votes have been counted as cast.

The Iowa bill does not ban DREs. It says counties cannot buy new ones as they replace what they bought with HAVA money just two years ago. One state senator is believed to be seeking money in the new budget for a quicker removal of these dreadful devices. Wish him luck.

Two Cleveland, Ohio, election workers got the maximum 18 month jail sentence Tuesday when they were sentenced for rigging the recount in 2004. The judge said he thought they were still protecting someone.

One outside investigator seems to agree:

Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter, appointed as an outside investigator to look into the election board in Cleveland, told that judge that the women had been uncooperative in the investigation and appealed for prison time for both.

“The defendants have never come clean,” he said.

The two women were supposed to randomly recount ballots in the Kerry-Bush race but they wanted to avoid the extra work so . . .

Prosecutors said the employees broke the law when they worked behind closed doors three days before the Dec. 16, 2004, recount to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand so they could avoid a lengthier, more expensive hand recount of all votes.

Paper trails are worthless if election workers act like this.

Sarasota was warned. Sarasota did nothing. Sarasota’s race for Congress came up 18,000 votes short. The wrong person went to represent Sarasota in Washington, D.C.

The loser filed suit over the voting machines. The state investigated. Sarasota did not mention the warning. The voting machine company (ES & S) did not mention the warning. The loser lost again. The voting machines were exonerated in the press.

The loser’s attorneys kept digging. On a website in North Carolina they found the warning memo. It said the touchscreens were erratic and slow. It said the voter may have to hold a finger on the screen for several seconds in order for the vote to register. It said to fix this problem before the election.

Sarasota didn’t do it, nor did they warn voters, nor did they admit they knew this when the 18,000 votes were missing.

I call that a cover up.

The whole story is well told at the Bradblog today. I am pleased to see Brad has abandoned his green background with the yellow lettering. This post is actually easy on the eyes, so I’m happy to link to it.

Among the complaints against the fired US attorneys was one from Karl Rove that they were not prosecuting voters, according to McClatchey’s Washington bureau:

Rove acknowledged that he personally complained to Miers that “voter fraud cases were not being treated as a priority” by the Justice Department, . . .

You gotta feel sorry for the attorneys, as Rove was asking them to do the impossible:

The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud. It is being used to persuade the public that deceitful and criminal voters are manipulating the electoral system. No available evidence suggests that voters are intentionally corrupting the electoral process, . . . In fact, when we probe most allegations of voter fraud we find errors, incompetence and partisanship. The exaggerated fear of voter fraud has a long history of scuttling efforts to make voting easier and more inclusive, . . .

Opponents of Iowa’s election day registration bill keep making this argument. History repeating itself.

There is a new map at Verified Voting. It shows Iowa in red.

Red states have fallen behind in the open elections department. Verified Voting’s map used to concern itself with whether states had paper trails for their balloting. Now they have moved on to asking whether states with paper trails are conducting audits to see if the machine count actually reflects the real count on the paper ballots.

States in red (danger!) on the new map have neither an audit nor even a paper trail.

Woe is Iowa.

At the heart of the current voting machine mess is the reliance on corporations to run public elections. One voting machine company just went out of business, leaving some Indiana counties up a creek without a paddle:

“From the best we can tell they no longer exist, so we have no support for our equipment,” Thornburg said.

The Wisconsin company’s telephone is disconnected.

That company does not run any Iowa voting machines, but this one does and they drove one Arkansas election official to resign:

Election Systems and Software is the company providing the Ivotronics machines and related software.

“The reason I am leaving is the provider of the Ivotronics and related software lacks competency to make their equipment work timely and effectively. They … make a difficult job impossible to do,” said Selph.

“They can’t spell, meet deadlines, send documents to the right address or code elections correctly. They leave races off the ballot for us to correct, they can’t program their software to work and you have to hand add the results. And they don’t return phone calls,” Selph said.

“The ES&S people in Arkansas are capable but the people I have dealt with in the home office in Omaha prevent them from being effective. They are also mean-spirited when you try to get them to correct the numerous and recurring errors,” he said.

The wonders of the market economy. They are not for elections