Iowa Voters

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.

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