Iowa Voters

Thanks to Iowa’s new voter registration law, you can vote June 3 even if you are not now registered. Just register at the polls. Or go to the county auditor’s office today to vote absentee (after you register under the new law).

These late registrations have tougher rules because you must prove your identity and residence in the precinct. Use your driver’s license or other government-issued photo id card. If the card shows an incorrect address, you can use other documents to establish your address: your lease, utility bill, bank statment, government document, or paycheck that shows your address.

OR — Get This!–go without any papers at all! Just go with another registered voter from your precinct and let that person swear you are who you say and you live in the precinct. This is so cool that I’m tempted to try it. I just need to find an unregistered voter who wants to vote in my singularly lackluster primary.

If you want to hear it from the Secretary of State, go here.

The 2004 campaign to purge voters from the roles in Florida has moved to Missouri. It has already been successful in Arizona and Indiana. See this tale with photo from Digby.

It’s hard to keep a lid on information in the age of the internet. Steve King and the English-only crowd should learn their lesson.

The Iowa voter registration forms are again available in multiple languages. While the Secretary of State is forbidden by law from providing them to citizens, others can offer them. The Iowa Council for International Understanding has put Spanish, Bosnian, Laotian and Vietnamese versions of the forms on its website. The ICIU has long provided translation services to Iowans.

These are unofficial forms. They cannot be turned it to the voter registration office. They can be used only as an aid in completing the actual form which is also on-line here.

From the AP in Indiana:

By DEBORAH HASTINGS

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”

Several times over the next few weeks HBO will show the 2006 movie “Hacking Democracy,” an investigation of voting machines. A little progress has been made to protect democracy from these machines, but the movie’s central questions remain unaddressed: How did Florida’s Volusia County report negative votes for Al Gore in 2000? And how can we defend against miscounted paper ballots when computers do the counting in secret?

We Iowans are patting ourselves on the back, having just dumped our touchscreens. But the legislature failed to take the next step–auditing the paper ballots after the computerized scanners do the initial count. The movie makes clear why this is needed.

This is a vivid and eye-opening film. Although I had read about many of the episodes documented in it, I had not seen it until today. I don’t have HBO, I never bought the DVD and never took the time to watch the nine part YouTube edition which starts here. Luckily for me a friend in Pocahontas taped the HBO showing yesterday and drove it over to my house.

I know some of what has happened since the film was first issued. It hints that the 2004 recount in Ohio was rigged, and indeed two people later got jail terms for their part in rigging it. It recounts several investigations by computer scientists into voting machine computer code, but there have been more investigations since. All of them always produce bad news for the voting machine advocates.

The film shows how some Florida scanners were hacked. The county involved got rid of those machines, but they (Diebold scanners) still dominate in Iowa.

We know what to do. We must count ballots by hand after the computer counts. If the race is close, we must count quite a few of the ballots. If it’s a landslide, we can audit a much smaller number of ballots. But we can’t take the computer’s word for it–ever.

Ask your local election workers at the June primary if they have seen the movie. Ask your favorite candidates if they have seen it. Ask your auditor why no audits are planned. Ask Secretary Mauro, too.