Iowa Voters

Tonight MoveOn.org is not practicing what it preaches. The lobby group has advocated paper trails for voting machines, but it is now conducting an apparently unverifiable poll via the internet, deciding which Democrat should be endorsed for the White House.

Actions speak louder than words. Shame on MoveOn. How will the supporters of the losing candidate know this vote was fairly conducted? Why did that link appear to work both times when people tried to vote twice? My two votes occurred hours apart, but MoveOn sent me thank you confirmations each time!

Update: Loebsack is a co-sponsor of Holt’s bill.

A new federal bill could resolve the tension between two of Iowa’s top Democrats–the Governor and the Secretary of State. Today’s Register reports that Mauro wants to get all our votes on paper ballots, but Culver is content to buy “paper trails” for the tempermental touchscreens that now infect the state’s polling places.

It’s a question of money (big surprise!). The good stuff that Mauro wants costs $10 million. Culver is content to waste $2 million on the widely cussed paper trail printers.

They should put their egos aside for a minute and agree on one thing: to call on our state’s Congressmen to support the brand new HR 5036. That new bill by New Jersey’s Rush Holt pays for replacement equipment when states wise up and dump their DRE touchscreens. It is not a mandatory bill, so there is only one point of contention: Do we have the money in the federal budget to mop up the mess HAVA made of voting machines all over the nation. States that are loving their mess don’t have to do a thing. States that are ready to wash up can have the soap paid for by the Congress that caused this problem in the first place.

None of Iowa’s Congressmen have signed on to this bill yet. I called Latham’s office in Fort Dodge this morning. Can you do your part?

Boswell in Des Moines (toll free) (888) 432-1984
Braley in Davenport: (563) 323-5988 or more choices
Latham in Ames: 515-232-2885 or tom.latham@mail.house.gov
Loebsack: email or in Cedar Rapids 319-363-2288
King on the web or in Sioux City call 712.224.4692

Media-savvy Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity took advantage of the slow pace of holiday news to get some airtime on Iowa Public Radio. He warned Iowans about those ES & S touchscreen voting gadgets that caused trouble in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Several Iowa counties use the same touchscreens, notably Sean’s own Johnson County, as well as Keokuk, Newton, Clinton, Estherville. (complete list here. Look for “iVotronic” in the right hand column.)

It seems the election workers in one South Carolina county failed to get through all 999 steps when they prepared the touchscreens for the primary voting. As a result, most of the county’s gadgets would not work when the polls opened. Voters had to wait or give up and go away.

Irony abounds. Sean and others had written all the Presidential campaigns earlier to warn them about Carolina’s wondrous paperless touchscreens. He feared a contentious result (similar to what already happened in New Hampshire) could not be resolved without a paper record of the vote. He neglected to point out to the candidates that the damn gadgets might prevent voting altogether–at least until the tech support crew arrived at the various polls with their fire hoses.

Though John McCain considered seeking a court order to keep the affected polls open past the regular closing time, most news coverage and most candidates pretended nothing happened. Just another messy election.

Is there any Hope? Yes, pencils don’t need much preparation. Audits can catch mistakes. Sean comforted his listeners by saying our home state was looking into it. The Experienced Mauro is on the case. We had our close call already. Time to fix the system. Hope and Experience together can do it.

Happy MLK birthday.

As New Jersey enacted an exemplary election audit law and New Hampshire waded into another recount, Computerworld reporter Todd Weiss called Iowa to ask, Can audits restore confidence in elections? His inquiry is “Today’s Top Story” at the Computerworld website.

Weiss already knew that real paper ballots had saved Pottawattamie County in the 2006 primary when Auditor Drake turned off her errant scanner machines and counted ballots by hand.

Our Secretary of State Mike Mauro told Weiss

“I think there’s a place for post-election audits, where they are randomly selected, and of a certain percentage of the vote, to look for anomalies,” Mauro said. “It will [be] up for discussion this year. We will be discussing it this session.”

“First, we’re trying to get everybody across the state on the same machines first,” he said. Some Iowa counties are using optical-scan machines while others use DRE machines or a mix of the two. The goal is to move toward 100% use of optical scan machines, in part because such machines provide a verifiable paper trail.

“Random audits, of a certain percentage, I’m not opposed to any of that” to ensure accurate and fair elections, he said.

Parts of New Jersey’s law are being crafted into an Iowa bill. Next time Computerworld calls Iowa, here’s hoping it’s because we are more like NJ than like NH.

Sean Flaherty, co-chair of Iowans for Voting Integrity, led off the primary election season with a fifteen minute interview on Iowa Public Radio’s Midday show on Tuesday.

He cited the many studies of voting machines that have found so many flaws, and emphasized that the main critics are computer scientists.

Flaherty concludes by arguing that final voting figures must be verifiable without relying on sofware. That means any electronically counted ballots must be audited. Audit laws are gaining ground in many states, notably in New Jersey.

Who would have ever thought that we might look to New Jersey for ways to improve Iowa’s election administration?

The interview begins two minutes and thirty seconds into the podcast.

Here’s another good video, apparently just posted at YouTube in the wake of the NH Clinton upset. It attacks the chain of custody for NH’s Diebold scanners and, best of all, shows the famous Harry Hursti hack from three years ago. Some 36,000 people have viewed it already this week, so don’t be left out!

I am not meaning to cast doubt on the Clinton win, but I am taking advantage of the news to remind Iowa that audits of the counted ballots are needed in every election. New Jersey just passed the nation’s best audit law, but Iowa does nothing at all. Let’s not get left out in the cold with unexamined ballots.

Thanks to Cindy for pointing me to this video. That’s Hursti in the video sitting in front of Silvestro, I think.

These aren’t works of art, now, just work-a-day looks at the actual caucus, collected here in the interests of open and transparent vote counting methods.

See actual Republican vote counting here (21 seconds) and here (31 seconds) and buried in the middle of this long one from Shenandoah.

See voters being recruited by a Des Moines group that is too small to be viable here (65 seconds).

Here’s an insider’s view of realigning and here’s a chairwoman carefully explaining why her caucus group must realign (90 seconds).

Finally here’s a Des Moines caucus condensed to four minutes. Nice work by the editor of this video.

If the Iowa Republican results are not yet available in more detail than we see here, then those results are not quite transparent. Somewhere someone had to add together the various precincts to get these county totals. No precinct can tell if the addition was correctly carried out because all the precinct numbers are unavailable. Have I missed the rest of the data somewhere?

This falls short of what the Dems have done.

Sorry but there will be no video posted from my caucus. There were only 12 persons in the Havelock Methodist Church and most said they did not want to appear on a YouTube video. I think most did not know what a YouTube video was, exactly, but they understood that they could get some notoriety and they were not so inclined.

My son attempted to shoot the proceedings anyway, keeping the camera on me all the time. It’s no fun to watch me while I listen to the debate about who is the best candidate, even though parts of the debate are clearly audible. So move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Meanwhile the Democratic reporting system is WAY COOL!
Look it over if you haven’t done so. We got feedback to our caucus within minutes of our report because a man in NYC was watching the internet and phoned to tell us what it showed. He said we were the first precinct in our county to report. He read back the results to us because we did not have a computer or internet connection there in the church. Thanks to Howard S. for that help.

Here’s a short version of a platform plank being advocated by Iowans for Voting Integrity. The full resolution is in the comment section below, as is another resolution for auditing election returns. Take these to your caucus if you want verifiable elections.

WHEREAS, an accurate and verifiable tabulation of votes is essential to democracy, and

WHEREAS, direct-recording electronic voting machines do not allow the voters to see how their votes are recorded and do not allow for an independent recount, and

WHEREAS, experience in other states has shown that adding printers to electronic voting machines in an attempt to produce a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail fails to resolve either basic security issues or the difficulties of conducting recounts on this equipment, and

WHEREAS, voter-marked paper ballots, counted by optical scanners or by hand, provide the most reliable record of voter intent,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that we support allocation of sufficient state funds for counties to replace all direct-recording electronic voting machines with optical scanners and ballot marking devices to serve voters with disabilities, in time for the November 2008 General Election; and

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we support federal legislation allocating funds to reimburse states for purchase of optical scanners and ballot marking devices.

The Republican straw poll will be posted precinct-by-precinct on a board at the the Polk County Convention Center tomorrow night. It will be potentially possible to verify the whole Republican vote process. This news came to me second hand (Thanks SF) from a voting integrity activist extraordinare.

A Republican caucus attendee must see the votes counted at the local precinct and then must see the totals board in Des Moines. That is not practical for most people, but campaigns can at least design phone trees for themselves if they want to have some feedback to the precincts about what got posted in Des Moines. Maybe someone can shoot a video of the big posting board every 15 minutes and put it on You Tube. It may not be as cool as what the Dems have done, but it has fewer layers of software, so that’s one advantage.