Iowa Voters

The Iowa Democratic Party has created a website that will show caucus results for each precinct as soon as they are reported to Des Moines via telephone. This is a virtual paper trail for this event, and very good news.

http://www.iowacaucusresults.com/

This practice is known as aggregating the vote in public. It is recommended by the DNC here. All counties should do it in every election. That is to say, they should promptly publish the precinct totals to the web on election night, right after they post the totals in the window of the precinct polling station. The Iowa Democratic Party is leading the way. Let’s hope the new Secretary of State (a Democrat) follows suit in June for the primary election.

I already announced my intention to post a video of my caucus on YouTube. Part of the video will show us phoning in the results of the delegate selection. I’ll also get someone who is not at the caucus to send back the results as soon as they appear on the internet. We’ll have confirmation that the world knows our outcome. That will be on the video, too.

from Common Cause Iowa here’s just what you need for Thursday night—

Resolution to support passage of the Fair Elections Now Act (US Senate File 1285) and Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (Iowa House File 805 & Senate File 553)

WHEREAS, our political system at all levels is increasingly dominated by the influence of large sums of private money that finance electoral campaigns, diminishing the right of all Iowans to equal and meaningful participation in the democratic process, and

WHEREAS, a number of states – including Arizona, Maine and Connecticut – have adopted systems of clean elections which provide full public financing for primary and general campaigns to candidates who opt to run “clean campaigns,” and
WHEREAS, such voluntary voter owned election laws have helped to restore democracy and public confidence in the election and governing processes of those states; and

WHEREAS, the State Government Committee of the Iowa House and Senate, have approved HF805 and SF 553 – the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) on a bi-partisan basis, and US Senate File 1285, the Fair Elections Now Act, has been proposed in the US Senate;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the (Iowa Democratic Party or Republican Party of Iowa) supports the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) and Fair Elections Now Act, to establish an election system in which candidates could choose to forego fundraising from private sources, accept spending limits and receive a set amount of money from a publicly financed election fund.

You Tube and the Des Moines Register have teamed up to host your video about the Iowa caucus in your precinct. Go for it!!! Lights, camera, action!

Here’s what I hope to see. Make sure to carefully identify your precinct and county at the beginning of your video. Include a scene of the caucus result being phoned in to party HQ. Get close enough to hear the caller and hope he (she) talks you through the call as various buttons are pushed for each candidate.

If you do that, the Iowa Democratic caucuses will be completely transparent. That’s our goal here at Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections. IDP intends to have a website that will report results precinct-by-precinct. The video will attest that the web results actually happened. One part of the internet will be checking on another part of the internet. It’s a new form of checks and balances.

This won’t work for the Republican caucuses since all their results go into a back room somewhere and get totalled up by cigar-chomping hacks—er—by devout deacons of the party faithful. Anyway, you can’t check or balance what they do. But you can still post a video of your caucus. I look forward to seeing some.

I’ll try to get my son to record the caucus in this precinct. I’ll have a link here as soon as he gets it posted.

Even I don’t agree with this Iowa caucus participant, but it’s nice to see the voters haven’t forgotten about our problematic voting machines. Look at this report filed from LeMars–

Claire Packard is an undecided voter. “The biggest issue I think is the voting machines and the progress that government has to make to get them up and going next year.”

Luckily the caucusses don’t use voting machines, so Iowa has a little more time to get ready. Voter Packard may be aware of the turmoil over voting machines that has rocked California, Ohio, New York, and Colorado in recent months. All’s quiet in Iowa, though, as our auditors try to implement our new paper trail law in a way they can be proud of. Stay tuned.

Iowa’s Democratic Party will take a big step forward in election reporting on January 3, 2008. They will report results from each precinct on a website. Caucus attendees will not have to wonder if their results were correctly tallied by some black box at the other end of the phone line used for reporting the winners.

Like in 2004 the precinct chairmen will use a touchtone phone to enter their results without actually talking to anyone at party headquarters. In 2004 there was no way to know if the phone system properly recorded or tallied the results. That will change in 2008, according to Carrie Giddens, communications director, who wrote this Friday:

The Iowa Democratic Party will have a public website displaying the caucus results as they are reported by each precinct. This website will show a number of things but will include the number of county delegates won by each candidate in each precinct, which will allow anyone around the world to see the caucus results down to the precinct level.

This follows the advice of the DNC in this document about public aggregation of election results.

I don’t know the website address yet or how timely it will be. I was told the techies at the Iowa Democratic Party were concerned that they might need an inordinate amount of bandwidth just to accommodate all the curious websurfers who would hit the site on caucus night. The real purpose of the site is to verify the vote for the candidates and the precinct people who phoned it in, but many stay-at-home types (and many Republcans) will be checking on their local result, so this seems like a realistic fear. Here’s hoping they have figured out how to handle it. And congratulations to them for making the effort.

How long before the Republicans can match this?