Iowa Voters

The University of Iowa’s professor Doug Jones, a world leader in voting machine oversight, has today described the Diebold voting machine audit logs as “just totally nuts.” Diebold machines count most of the votes in Iowa elections. The audit logs are supposed to reveal what the machine has been doing as it proceeds through the stages of ballot reading and counting.

Audit logs came under scrutiny in Humboldt County, California when a public auditing process discovered that votes had not been counted in the official results. Those official totals had come from Diebold (now hiding behind the name Premier) vote counting software. Wired.com interviewed Jones, who said

“These audit logs could give us some assurances [about an election] if they were genuinely designed so that a casual bystander could look at them and understand them,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and former chairman of a board that examines and approves voting machines for use in Iowa. “[But] having them cryptic and obscure destroys the value in terms of election transparency.”

So it seems that Diebold logs don’t tell everything that happened in the correct order, as we all thought a log was supposed to do. Wired’s “Threat Level” reporter Kim Zetter goes on–

The audit logs appear to record only limited types of events on the system and provide no comprehensive record that tracks every event performed by an election official.

Premier didn’t respond to a query from Threat Level about the logs. But Jones said the Premier/Diebold system, as far as he knows, provides no single log file that chronologically lists all events in the life of an election.

Instead, he says, the system keeps “lots and lots of different logs” that appear to have been “independently designed by people who didn’t talk to each other” and that are incomprehensible to anyone except the vendor. He assumes Premier has documentation explaining how to interpret the logs, but says if it does, the company doesn’t share that information with election officials, making independent audits of a voting system difficult if not impossible.

So . . .lots of logs . . .don’t talk to each other . . .need documentation to interpret the logs . . .but WAIT—

“From the point of view of actually doing any forensics, it’s a mess,” Jones said. “Because you have to understand what all of the logs are saying, and all of the documentation to understand what they’re saying are not public documents. I find that truly reprehensible. The idea that you can have this inscrutable document, but that you can’t have any document to understand that document, is just totally nuts.”

I know that Iowa auditors are conferring with the Secretary of State about a weak audit bill for the current legislature to consider. “It will be better than nothing,” I was told. Given the “threat level,” I think that is a pretty low standard for a state that wants to be First in the Nation again in 2012. Having fallen for Diebold’s disasterous devices despite Jones’s best efforts to protect Iowa, we need a strong audit bill. States from Maine to California (literally) are pushing past us.

cross posted at BleedingHeartland. You can comment there, too.

(Update Below)

This fall the registrar of Humboldt county, California allowed local citizens to post all the ballots on the internet after the election. This was an audacious and innovative project. And guess what? This audit uncovered two counting errors, one of which traces directly to the secret software Diebold used to count the paper ballots and has made national news among election officials.

Meanwhile the local newspaper has praised the publication of the ballots in today’s editorial, noting that

To make this perfectly clear, if the transparency project were not around, the vote of Humboldt County’s voters would have been inaccurately tabulated.

This was not a recount in the wake of a close election. No one suspected these errors. The “logic and accuracy tests” upon which all county officials hang their hats had not prevented these errors. As the editorialists observe:

What better way to make sure vote counts are accurate than to make it possible for anyone and everyone across the state to conduct their own recounts, whenever and however they choose? It smells like democracy.

Iowa ballots get hidden away after the election. No one is supposed to look at them while they wait to be destroyed months later. We are light years behind this California county.

UPDATE:
Here’s the site where you can see the ballots:
http://hum.dreamhosters.com/etp/

Further details (h/t Mitch)
http://www.humtp.com
http://democracycounts.blogspot.com
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/Nov2008
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/ourvotes.html
http://www.tevsystems.com/press.html (for more links)

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal blasted the Minnesota Senate recount. Here’s a point by point defense of Minnesota by some who has watched the recount much closer than the Journal has. And btw, I agree with his opening praise for the WSJ in general.