Iowa Voters

You’ve never seen a more patriotic video than this one.

It documents how the people of Wilton, NH count their 2200 paper ballots by hand. And it explains why some of the counters are sitting on some of the ballots while they work: it’s a low tech (how much lower could you get?) solution to the common computer problem of having more votes tallied than there were ballots cast.

Here’s another, wherein the volunteers of Lyndeborough, NH count 1100 ballots at no cost to the city. They actually turned away volunteers in 2004.

Update: Here’s the whole show.

Correction: Calhoun has been dropped from the list of Ivotronic counties.

Dan Rather is out tonight with an expose of ES & S touchscreen voting machines. He says they were made in a sweatshop in the Phillippines where quality control consisted of grabbing the gadget with both hands and giving it a shake. This was supposed to expose any loose parts.

Here’s a twelve minute excerpt.

The following Iowa counties have the Ivotronic: Emmet, Calhoun, Jasper, Fayette, Clayton, Clinton, Johnson, and Lee.

Two bizarre “audits” of today’s straw poll in Ames were announced –one to cast doubt on the process and one to soothe fears of skeptical voters. Neither audit could accomplish much of anything.

The official Republican “audit” was being conducted by the state auditor David Vaudt. I inquired as to how it would work. My question was answered by a county auditor who had volunteered to help out and was supervising the 6 Diebold scanners in Hilton Coliseum. He said that at some point one of the six scanners would be opened and its stack of ballots would be counted to determine that the number of ballots matched the machine’s count of ballots that had been deposited.

No ballots would actually be examined. The audit would not show that the machine had properly read the pencil mark on the ballot or that it had properly totalled the ballots marked for each candidate. It would only show that the machine contained the number of ballots that its indicator screen claimed.

Such an audit is of no help in reassuring that the count for each candidate is accurate. We want to know that the machine did NOT take every tenth Tancredo vote and move it to Mitt. Such mischief could terminate Tom Tancredo.

Mitt moved mountains to win the poll. Ron Paul supporters need to know Mitt was not able to move votes inside the black boxes. They are a skeptical bunch.

Worse than the Republican audit was the one going on outside the polling place by people in yellow shirts saying VoteinSunshine. They were conducting a non-random exit poll. They gave voters a yellow half page paper to sign. The paper said the signer was signing because he wanted the votes to be properly counted. Signers were also supposed to scribble down the name of the candidate for whom they had just voted back at the Diebold scanner. The papers were then deposited in a translucent plastic box.

According to a Wisconsin woman working on this project, these exit poll results would be counted and reported at the same time (7 pm) as the official results.

Unfortunately many voters walked past the exit poll without participating. The woman claimed Romney voters put “their noses in the air.”

So what good is this? Vote in Sunshine will have different results from the official results because some groups will be undersampled by their casual methods. For all their efforts to advocate hand counting and to insist that ballots actually be examined by citizens, their totals will be worthless and that will undermine their work.

Really good audits are not hard to do. Some fraction of the scanners would have their ballots recounted by hand. Landslide results require very small audits. Close elections require more extensive hand counting. Statisticians know how to determine the minimum size audit for any circumstances. It’s time we started this practice.

Update: See the comment section for news of a parallel election planned for tomorrow at the Iowa Straw Poll. Organizers will count those ballots in public! Good for them.

Two guests of WHO talker Jan Mickelson demanded Wednesday that the Republican straw poll be conducted in such a way that the ballots are always in public view and be counted in public. Two more guests from the Iowa Republican party were unable to say who had actually programmed the vote counting machines and denied that anyone would want to manipulate the result anyway.

Republicans generally have not been engaged by the voting machine debate and it showed in the inability of the two Republicans, Chuck Laudner and Ted Sporer, to hold their own against the critics, Bob Schultz and James Condit. Sporer tried to compensate with bluster and threats against the critics.

The case against voting machines was buttressed by UI’s Doug Jones in the second part of the show. He cited all the studies by computer scientists which have concluded we have inferior equipment for vote counting.

Listen to the show here.

Another point made by the critics was that the straw poll has become a quasi-public event because so many county auditors, the state auditor and Story county’s voting machines are all involved.

At the end of the show a caller asked the obvious question: Why use such complicated equipment for such a simple poll? There will be only one mark on each ballot. Hand counts would be more fun, transparent and quick enough.

In a late-night press conference convened just before the Friday midnight deadline for voting system changes before next spring’s primary election, Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced widespread decertification of most types of electronic voting equipment used in California, including the Diebold TSx, which is also widely used in Iowa.

The withdrawal of certification for the equipment was the culmination of a complete top-to-bottom review of all election systems used in California. In her campaign for Secretary of State last fall, Ms Bowen, a former state senator, had promised a thorough study of the state’s voting systems, which she set in motion immediately upon taking office last January. The review consisted of four separate studies encompassing all aspects of the system: security, accessibility, system software, and a review of official documents related to the equipment.

“Secretary of State Bowen took the only responsible course of action in light of the severity of the study’s findings,” said Robert Ferraro, a Co-Director of SAVE Our Votes, a grass-roots citizens’ group working for Secure, Accessible, Verifiable Elections in Maryland.

The decertifications will prohibit the use of most Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting equipment, often referred to as touch-screen machines, except for those used in early voting and one in each precinct to provide accessibility for voters with disabilities. These DREs have been conditionally reapproved under stringent conditions for their use, including a requirement to handcount all of the voter-verified paper print-outs from the machines instead of using the electronic votes tallied by the machine. California already requires each voting machine to provide a voterverified paper record of each vote for use in audits and recounts of election results. A paper trail bill also passed in Iowa this spring.

While many of the reports’ findings reconfirm vulnerabilities revealed in previous studies, some shocked even the computer experts who performed those earlier reviews. Dr. Aviel Rubin, a computer security expert at Johns Hopkins University who scrutinized voting source code from Diebold Election Systems, Inc. in 2003 commented on his blog, “In all cases, the analysts were able to rewrite the firmware on the machines. This means that an attacker could change every aspect of the behavior of the voting systems….There are many other examples of attack that are much more serious than what I expected from this report — and I was expecting a lot.”

The full reports from California are posted.

This post adapted from a press release by Robert Ferraro.

This morning on Iowa Public Radio the state GOP executive director was discussing the straw poll coming up in Ames. He said all voters will have to show an Iowa driver’s license and took the opportunity to reiterate the GOP goal of foisting such a requirement on voters in real elections by amending the voting laws.

If I heard him right, the interesting part was the reason this requirement has been added to the straw poll. It seems non-Iowans were coming all the way to Ames to cast votes even though this was not supposed to be allowed. Republicans were cheating in their own elections.

Their troubles hardly justify requiring new state laws that would reduce turnout, since such cheating in real elections is virtually unheard of.