Iowa Voters

New York still uses mechanical lever voting machines such as Iowa once used. They are the only state still doing so. Attorney Andrea Novick and NY writer Ruth Wahtera each have blogs that make the case for levers over scanners. Novick has researched NY case law and believes that spot checks of ballots (known loosely as “audits”) after election night violate NY constitutional law. I’ve linked these blogs on the blogroll on the right side of this page, and here they are:
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition

Save NY’s Lever Voting Machines

After reading some of Novick’s work I came to understand the Iowa law that seals up our ballots on election night and prohibits anyone from examining them until the day they are burned. New York has such a law. It is intended to prevent fraudulant recounts. New York assumed that once the ballots leave the polling place their custody is no longer secure and they can be altered or more can be stuffed into the box or some could fall out of the box, etc. So NO RECOUNTS are allowed in New York.

Of course this law assumed that the election night count was not made by concealed software which hardly anyone present could understand or verify. Perhaps Iowa law had assumed the same thing. Nowadays we have electronic vote counting by anonymous programmers. The election night count cannot be accepted at face value.

I’m getting nostalgic for lever machines. Plus I hear they last for 100 years.

This week a bill to randomly check on the electronic vote tally by actually looking at some ballots (ah–the audacity!) passed the Iowa House without dissent. But it’s already being stymied in the Senate, though no one is sure why. This paradoxically reverses the situation from four years ago when the Senate unanimously passed a paper trail bill only to see the House kill it without explanation.

Meanwhile the great state of Montana on Tuesday signed its audit bill into law. A picture of the Montana Secretary of State appeared in GovTech magazine as a result. Let’s tell Senate Democrats that Mike Mauro is just as good looking as Secretary McCulloch and also deserves to be featured in national publications.

cross-posted at BleedingHeartland.org

It’s just like the federal Election Assistance Commission (created by HAVA) to keep quiet about the bad news, so don’t be surprised at this story. They were warned last month about the dangers of computerized vote counts, but they kept the warning out of the press until McClatchy broke the story this week.

The warning came from the CIA. An agent said some provocative things such as

“I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen.”

He also alleged that two highly publicized 2004 elections had seen electronic tampering–Venezuela and Ukraine. Lots of Americans think Ohio should be added to that list of fishy 2004 elections.

Secret Agent guy says opportunities abound when computers are used at the polls:

Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

Internet voting was also panned by Stigall. We have all the bad stuff right here in the USA: internet balloting, computerized counting (in Iowa yet!), paperless voting machines, wireless connections, and motivated politicians, I’m sure. I wouldn’t even trust the CIA.

Iowa blogger desmoinesdem has pointed out that only two other states allow absentee ballots to be counted before election day.

The price we pay for faster results in close races will be this: wondering if insider knowledge of the Monday count was used to flip the close race.

Pretty ironic! This whole bill is supposed to relieve the anxiety of waiting for close races that get decided by the absentee count. Instead it will provoke a new anxiety about whether the early count leaked out.

The Iowa House has passed a bill to speed up election returns, as if getting speedy results were the main goal of the counting. The House wants to count absentee ballots before the polls open, something that is now strictly forbidden.

Don’t worry about this affecting the election by giving one side a warning that the results may be close. Don’t worry–it will be illegal to leak this information even though some highly political people at the courthouse will know the information on the absentee results. Don’t worry even if the county auditor himself is in a tight re-election race. Having his staff counting the ballots on Monday won’t allow him to be warned about his imminent defeat on Tuesday. Don’t think that the people who went to jail in Ohio for rigging the recount in 2004 have any cousins in Iowa election departments.

If this is HSB 133 we’re talking about (the news reports don’t give the bill number) there’s even less reason to worry. The bill now on the web says only quite a few party cheerleaders will get to bite early on the apple of knowledge:

The only persons who may be admitted to that room are

the members of the board,
one challenger representing each political party,
one observer representing any nonparty political organization or
any candidate nominated by petition pursuant to chapter 45 or
any other nonpartisan candidate in a city or school election appearing on the ballot of the election in progress,
one observer representing persons supporting a public measure appearing on the ballot and
one observer representing persons opposed to such measure,
and the commissioner or the commissioner’s designee.

I’m sure they can keep a secret, so don’t worry, be happy. Get to bed early on election night. It was a long campaign. Just be glad it’s over.

But if it’s really close, we still won’t know about recounts or audit results. We’ll still have to wonder. So what’s the point for democracy? Early bedtimes? Insider trading?