Iowa Voters

I’ve mostly stopped writing about electronic voting machines since the state legislature got rid of the terrible touchscreens. The problem of electronically counted votes is still with us, however.

Yesterday the New York Times editorialized about states that count paper ballots by machine but do not double check the count. We just take the machine’s word for it. We should know better!

Electronic voting is notoriously vulnerable to technical glitches and vote theft. By now, most states have passed good laws requiring paper records of every vote cast — an important safeguard. But that is not enough. States also need strong audit laws to ensure that machine totals are vigilantly checked against the paper records. That is the only way that voters will be able to trust electronic voting.

The Times focuses on Florida but notes that most states are in the same blind spot.

Florida has a particularly flawed audit law — not a comforting thought given its recent history. . . . It’s easy to pick on Florida — and it deserves the criticism — but the problem is a national one. All states should require audits of all major races before election results are certified. They should require that a sufficiently large percentage of the ballots be checked to be statistically meaningful. States also need clear guidelines for what they will do — to investigate, and if necessary set aside flawed results — when a significant level of error is detected.

This fall’s election will likely go unaudited in Iowa. If the election is not close, momentum for audits will suffer. Our reform will be less than half finished until we get some eyes on the ballots to verify the machine count.