Iowa Voters

The Iowa House has passed the paper trail bill, one which leads eventually to the end of the trail for touchscreen DREs in this state. It’s a victory for good government and citizen activism.

Iowa’s bill includes $2 million to bail counties out of the mess they wandered into when they bought paperless touchscreen voting machines, known in the trade as Direct Recording Electronics (DREs). Auditors who have them must either replace them now or buy paper trail printers to augment them. They have until June 15 to make their choice. You have about half that time to make your opinion known to your auditor if you want to have an impact.

When the current touchscreens wear out or embarrass their owners by mis-performing (see North Carolina, Cuyahoga county, Sarasota, etc.), auditors are not allowed to buy anymore of them. Iowa has now prohibited both punchcards and DREs. We will have only optically scanned ballots in the sweet bye and bye.

Thanks to State Representative Mary Gaskill who led this effort in the House and to Senator Jack Kibbie whose sound bite on WOI radio in 2005 kicked off the campaign in Iowa.

Kibbie had pointed to the unresolved race in North Carolina in 2004 in which paperless voting machines lost 4,000 votes. He introduced a bill to get paper trails for Iowa. Auditors and county election directors resisted, sending Dawn Williams, Mary Mosiman and Linda Langenberg to testify against the bill. Feeling the resistance, Kibbie told his constituents to write letters to the editors of the DM Register.

During that session the Senate had its own troubles with its electronic voting board and got religion. They passed Kibbie’s bill unanimously. It stalled in the House under the influence of Langenberg’s own state representative who was chair of the relevant committee. Meanwhile Iowa auditors spent their HAVA money, buying hundreds of paperless voting gadgets.

Simultaneously Iowans for Voting Integrity was born. Their leaders spoke to State Representative Mary Gaskill, informing her that Iowa had its own expert on electronic voting in UI professor Doug Jones. Gaskill was in the minority in Des Moines, but she acted anyway, scheduling Jones for an informal discussion of paper trails at the statehouse in March 2006. Some legislators attended.

The House finally took up the bill but only because the majority Republicans hoped to use it as a way to also get tougher voter ID laws. The gambit failed. Vilsack wasn’t going to sign any such deal.

Meanwhile the news was grim for DREs. A string of studies from Blackbox Voting, Princeton University, UConn, NYU’s Brennan Center, GAO, Congressional Research Service coupled with negative news coverage from Cleveland, Chicago, Florida, California, New York, Colorado, New Jersey and elsewhere exposed the weaknesses and poor performance of the DRE technology. It was all topped off by two spectacular voting machine failures, one in Council Bluffs and the other in Florida. The Iowa fiasco in June was salvaged because there was a paper trail to recount. The Florida Congressional race in November probably sent the wrong candidate to Congress because there was no paper trail for the 18,000 missing votes.

That same November election brought paper ballot user Mike Mauro in as SoS and a Democratic majority in both parts of the legislature. The stage was set.

Mauro moved first, inexplicably appointing paper trail opponent Langenberg to be his election director. Had he abandoned his campaign promise? Maybe he had merely co-opted the auditors by bringing the critics into the tent. At any rate, he got the job done. Support for the paper trail bill remained high in the legislature and new bills were introduced.

At least one was a trick! It required printers but gave the printed ballot no role! Someone (we don’t know who it was) had tried to fool the legislators with a pretend paper trail.
A new point man for IVI, Sean Flaherty, began contacting legislators at every stage of the process.

The current bill accomodates those unrepentent auditors who won’t recognize the perils of DREs or won’t admit they erred. They can put more of our money into those gadgets via the paper trail printer contraptions. But there it ends. No more paperless equipment can be purchased.

That way we always will have something to audit. We still need audits. All these ballots are counted by computerized scanners and thus subject to hacks and errors galore. After the election there should be a system for examining ballots by hand to verify the machine’s work.

Federal legislation is pending that addresses this. Perhaps Gaskill will also address it next year. Encourage her.

This was too good to pass over, even though it is not about Iowa. New voting machines in France were condemned following Sunday’s vote because they caused long lines (up to two hours). Here’s the best quip:

Philippe de Villiers, a nationalist Catholic candidate in the election, called it a “cheating machine” as he voted in his home town of Herbiers in western France.

I think this election had only one race. I just read in the Christian Science Monitor about the usual French voting method (No Hanging Chads) using an envelope and preprinted slips of paper. Voters get an envelope and can select as many paper slips as they want. Each slip has one candidate’s name on it. Then in the voting booth, they select one slip to put in the envelope. They drop the envelope in the ballot box as they leave the poll.

I guess that was too low tech for the 21st century. Gotta have expensive touchscreens!

Sean Flaherty, chairman of Iowans for Voting Integrity, has reported on the progress of legislation in Iowa. We appear about to phase out touchscreen DREs, but to spend more money on the dreadful DREs in the meantime by putting paper trail printers on them. It’s up to your auditor whether you dump the DREs now or pour more money down their rathole first. You should weigh in with your auditor.

Sean is thinking ahead, too, reminding us that routine manual recounts (audits!) are still needed whenever computers do the initial counting:

Iowa still has no audit requirement, and as the Brennan Center’s Task Force on Voting System Security observed last year, without an automatic routine audit, paper ballots are of questionable security value.

Sean has done Herculean work on your behalf. Send him and the rest of IVI a “Thank You”.

This morning National Public Radio broadcast a report praising Iowa’s system for drawing legislative and Congressional district boundaries. We’re the only state in the nation that lets the voters pick the Congressman instead of letting the Congressmen pick their voters (throught their control of redistricting). Jim Leach and Mike Gronstal were interviewed.

The non-partisan system dates back to a ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court and an subsequent law signed by Robert Ray in 1972.

We’re also envied for our system of selecting judges and voting periodically on whether to retain them in office. And for our first in the nation Presidential caucuses. Now if we could add a clean elections VOICE, we could really be heard!

MoveOn has alerted Iowa subscribers to contact legislators on behalf of the VOICE bill for clean elections:

Can you imagine if Iowa’s lawmakers owed nothing to corporate lobbyists and owed everything to voters? Iowa could join the cutting-edge of truly democratic elections. And if Iowa adopts public financing this year, the presidential candidates will have to go on record about this bold reform—putting the national spotlight on Clean Elections.

Two weeks left in the legislative session.

It is possible to “steal all the votes in [Clayton or Fayette] county without being detected” according to a “respected computer scientist who is familiar with the inner workings of the ES&S iVotronic electronic voting system.” The iVotronic is the only voting machine available in Clayton and Fayette counties. It is also used by some voters in Emmet, Calhoun, Jasper, Lee, Johnson, and Clinton counties.

The charge of insecure voting machines has been made to the federal Election Assistance Commission following a study of the machines in Florida. These machines were responsible for the 18.000 missing votes in Sarasota’s Congressional race last November. The news of this vulnerability is being withheld by the EAC but has been leaked to VotersUnite.org. The anonymous computer scientist concludes

One consequence for advocates is that this is further evidence that it’s not just one vendor who has serious security problems; it’s a second instance this sort of virus vulnerability. Don’t let anyone tell you that if we just “kick Diebold off the island” all of the security problems will go away.

The scientist warns local officials,

Don’t use the iVotronic in major elections until the security problems have been verified to be fixed. . . . Because making these kinds of changes to a voting system and getting approval from testing labs and certification authorities is a lengthy process, if we are to fix this problem before the 2008 primary, it is important to get this process underway immediately.

I have a better idea. Switch to paper ballots.

Senate Majority leader Mike Gronstal is quoted today saying “I don’t necessarily like the rules” about political campaigns.

He’s in luck!! He can change the rules. He can bring to the Senate floor the Iowa clean elections bill we call VOICE.

If Gronstal thinks Rants has set a bad example by creating a 527 campaign organization, he should set a different example with VOICE. Merely following Rants’s lead is me-too-ism.

Carpe diem, Senator Gronstal.

A candidate’s voice has been stilled, and he notes fundraising was a problem in his last race. Quoted at jdeeth’s blog, 2006 Democratic candidate Mark Nolte says:

It was very disheartening to me to learn that the party leadership is only supportive of candidates who are willing to accept special interest money and who serve to feed the larger machine. I didn’t get into this to be a fund raiser, I got into this to serve my state and spread the message that special interest groups are stealing our democracy.

He’s not running in 2008 even though the seat he sought will be an open seat with the retirement of incumbent Sandy Greiner.

Any puppets want to dance in House district 89?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way!! I know how to get the money for Iowa’s clean elections bill. And is it ever SWEET!

Look here: Plug the Wal-Mart Loophole

It’s real tax money that now gets slyly siphoned out of the state and turned into tax-free profits for Wal-Mart and other devious corporations who operate in many states. They shift their money around, turning Iowa profits into “expenses” that they “owe” to their other pockets in other states where the money is not taxed. Eventually it becomes untaxed profits.

This reform is known as “combined reporting” and it could have brought us $99 million in the year 2002. That’s FAR MORE than the ten million that we supposedly can’t find for VOICE.

We know where it is and we know how to get it. What are we waiting for, more campaign contributions to Patrick Murphy from Wal-Mart?

Well, maybe they expect only Michigan Dems will have opinions about what their state party does, but they already heard from me. Want to chip in? What else you got to do?

The Michigan Democrats want to allow internet voting in their Presidential primary again this year and have asked for public comment by April 27.

You can read the plan here and comment by fax (517-371-2056) or mail (606 Townsend, Lansing, MI 48933) or by email to jmoon@michigandems.com

You’ll look in vain (see page 6) for any explanation of why they think internet voting is secure. They may not even know it’s risky.

So that was my public comment and it’s one you can pose as easily: “Please tell us what computer scientists have defended the security of your internet voting scheme. If you can’t mount a knowledgable case for it, then don’t do it. It sets the stage for insecure internet voting in the general election. Don’t set a bad example.”

See how easy that is? By April 27 you could probably write something even better. (Hat tip to JMC in NC)

Happy Easter. Let’s talk about Easter eggs.

Not the holiday Easter eggs, but the computer software easter eggs–hidden bits of programming that open up only when certain secret commands are given. They are a threat to voting machines.

That’s one reason machines are supposedly “tested and tested and tested” –to see if the code works correctly and to hunt for easter eggs. Testing might find hidden code, but it can’t guarantee no hidden code went undetected.

So we have asked for open source software, or at least for the current software to be made public. Even if the code is open today, a future change of code could introduce new problems. Most election officials and poll watchers can’t tell the status of the code anyway.

There’s a better solution to this threat: audits

We can’t decipher code but we could easily audit the paper ballots. A good audit could make us 99% certain that the election was correctly called.

We just need to let statisticians show us how many ballots to hand count in each case. The number varies with the number of precincts, their sizes, and the margin of victory.

Relying on software to determine elections has been condemned by the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the National Institute for Standards and Technology. It’s time to turn to audits.

The judge handling Congressman King’s lawsuit against Chet Culver over English-only voting has recused herself. It’s a question of campaign finance and an argument for public financing (VOICE).

The judge (or her spouse) gave a lot of money to Chet Culver when he ran for Governor. She should not be hearing a lawsuit against Culver.

I dare say she (her husband?) should not be contributing to candidates for Governor. If we want equal justice in the courts, we can’t have judges financing candidates in the other branches of government. We don’t make our judges run for office (another case when Iowa’s system is the national envy). We shouldn’t make any candidates rely on contributions that generate such conflicts of interest.

Public financing is in the public interest. In campaign financing it is Arizona and Maine that are being envied by the nation.

Use your voice on the phone to get your political VOICE back! You can join this weekend and next with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement in canvassing and calling to motivate our legislators. E-mail jessica@iowacci.org if you would like to help.

Here’s some of the options:

Phone Banks:
-Friday, April 6, 10am-noon
-Friday, April 13, 10am-noon
-Friday, April 20, 10 am-noon
-Wednesday, April 11, 5:30-8:30 pm
-Wednesday, April 18, 5:30-8:30 pm

On Saturday, April 14 and 21, there will be one group working on the phone bank and another group doing door to door canvassing. They expect to work from 10am-2pm both days.

You may be able to help even if you don’t live in Des Moines.
Get in touch with Jessica. Use your voice for VOICE.

jessica@iowacci.org

How much allegiance do legislators owe to their campaign contributors?

Essential Estrogen has chided Rep. Dawn Pettengill for her opposition to the union shop bill known as Fair Share, saying “You Gotta Dance With Them What Brung Ya.” EE points to Pettengill’s sources of campaign contributions and suggest she owes them her vote.

So contributors are more important than constituents?

Contributors are indeed out to buy influence, but legislators are under no moral obligation to sell out when they accept contributions. It’s a gamble on the part of the contributors (with the odds in their favor). How else can candidates proceed? Few candidates have such safe districts or such winsome personalities that they can forego large party or PAC contributions and still expect to beat a better-financed opponent.

If Essential Estrogen has the moral landscape right, they have endorsed a vicious circle. The status quo will keep electing candidates who were financed with special interest money until the Governor signs a new law ending the system. But we can’t get there unless legislators break out of the circle by jilting all their contributors when they vote to end privately paid campaigns. Those contributors want to maintain their influence, so all who vote for VOICE will be acting similarly to Pettengill.

Legislators who act primarily in the interest of major contributors aren’t dancing with those that brung them so much as they are dancing like puppets on a string. Is that a party candidates really want to attend?

The creative plan to elect our President without the electoral college and without having to amend the Constitution is making slow gains. Last year it passed in California but their Governor terminated it.

It has just passed both houses of the Maryland legislature. Governor O’Malley has promised to sign it, making Maryland’s ten electoral votes the first to go into the pool. Only 260 more to go.

Currently one house of the legislature has approved the plan in Colorado, Hawaii, and Arkansas. It was introduced in Iowa as a study bill, but our legislature is too busy with other election reforms to take it up this term.