Iowa Voters

Voting machines became a hot topic after the election recount in Florida in 2000. Photos of people holding ballots up to the light to determine whether a hole was punched or not (pregnant chads) led to calls for new voting equipment to replace old systems.

Congress reacted 2 years later with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It provided big bucks to any jurisdiction that wanted new equipment for election day and it required new statewide voter registration databases.

The spending spree began. Touchscreen computers were the neatest thing election workers had ever seen, so they came to dominate the discussion. But computer scientists spoke up: “What? Are you kidding?”

The scientists knew that computers can be error prone (crash!) and can be insecure (hacked!). They warned election directors not to rely on computers that tally votes but have no paper trail. Many election directors claimed the computer scientists were sticking their noses into the wrong business.

There were many investigations that buttressed the objections of the scientists. There were also many apparently smooth elections and many smooth salesmen of voting machines that tended to reassure the election directors.

So most states began buying paperless equipment while some voters complained to the legislature. Most legislatures responded by passing laws to require the touchscreen voting machines to produce a paper printout of the vote that the voter could use to justify confidence in the machine.

But not in Iowa. The state senate voted 48-0 for such a bill in 2005, but the House did not act. Meanwhile the counties began purchasing the dreaded paperless equipment, putting the state in a peculiar pickle: The HAVA money is gone and the state’s voting system has come to be more like Florida in 2000 than it was before we started!!!

When the legislature came back into session in 2006, I started this blog.