Iowa Voters

Last week as the legislature was dumping touchscreens and mandating paper ballots, the American Statistical Association was getting into the debate. Their board adopted a “Position on Electoral Integrity” that reminds us to actually look at the paper ballots.

“It is critical that the integrity of central vote tabulations be confirmed by audits of voter-verified hard-copy records in order to provide high - and clearly specified - levels of confidence in electoral outcomes… Certification of any electoral outcome should require substantiating evidence that the putative winner was the intended selection of the plurality of voters.

That’s a clumsy way of saying, “Don’t let the scanner do all the thinking.”

A bill to require audits languishes in the legislature today. We’ll have the ballot system we wanted but we’re still using an insecure, fallible computer to read the votes and add the votes. We need to get our pollworkers eyes involved, too.

The House has followed the Senate, voting for paper ballot systems througout Iowa. The bill protects our next Presidential election from the terrible touchscreens:

Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary, for elections held on or after November 4, 2008, a county shall
use an optical scan voting system only. The requirements of
the federal Help America Vote Act relating to disabled voters
shall be met by a county through the use of electronic ballot
marking devices that are compatible with an optical scan
voting system.

It’s nice to see how non-controversial this has become. Although there was a grumpy editorial in the Dubuque newspaper this week, the current news story at the DM Register has not even drawn any anonymous comments as of this posting.

The Governor’s signature is expected in due course.

The Iowa Senate has taken us halfway out of the paperless touchscreen trap on a 47-1 vote for an all paper voting system. Jennifer Jacobs has the story.

One legislator said on the radio today that we are hereby modernizing our voting system. That sounds like a refrain from just 3 years ago when we were suckered into new touchscreens–the “modern” system of its (brief) time.

Jacobs reports that touchscreens “have fallen from favor in the last couple of years as watchdog groups rail about equipment failures and security vulnerabilities.” She ought to say that the really credible watchdogs have been computer scientists. And they were “railing” in plenty of time to have avoided this whole fiasco, had the election officials been listening.

Michael Mauro listened. He never fell into the touchscreen trap. Now he is getting us out. Next step: the Iowa House.

A new bill approved by committee today in the Iowa Senate moves us much closer to paper ballots. Senate Study bill 3262 mandates paper ballots for the fall election and the state picks up the tab!

This goes a step beyond previous plans passed last spring to phase out touchscreens as they wear out. That bill also required paperless touchscreen terminals to have printers added to them. Arguments over the cost and who would pay for the printers, as well as over the poor performance they have showed in other states, prompted Governor Culver to flirt with a vote by mail system instead of buying more equipment to replace our 2005 purchases.

When the all mail ballot idea was panned by the state’s auditors this winter, Culver agreed to fund ballot marking devices for all counties that preferred them to touchscreen printers. Today’s legislation amends last year’s Iowa law by phasing out the touchscreens after September’s school board races.

No doubt the recent revenue estimate for the state has made this move much easier–state tax collections are exceeding expectations

UPDATE: The video below was just getting a good start circulating the internet when the real news told us a major US military contractor has made an unsolicited bid to buy Diebold. United Technologies, makers of Pratt & Whitney jet engines and Sikorsy helicopters now wants to make voting machines, too. Diebold has rejected the offer. Stay tuned and remember Ike’s warning about the military-industrial complex garnering “unwarranted influence” over democracy.
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While we wait for our shadowy overlords to write laws to protect us from voting machines, we can imagine what might happen if they don’t get it done: