Iowa Voters

The Attorney General of Michigan has ruled that voted paper ballots can be obtained by the public under Michigan freedom of information laws.

A person must be allowed to inspect or examine voted ballots, which are not traceable to the individual voter, and to receive copies of the ballots upon request subject to reasonable restrictions prescribed by the Secretary of State. The public body may charge a fee for the copying of the voted ballots . . . .

The ballots cannot be so accessed until 30 days after the election has been certified. By that time all recounts will have been finished. Only people who want to audit voting machines as a routine practice are likely to be interested in exercising this right. Such an inspection would not overturn the results of a race even if problems were found with the official tally of votes.

The Code of Iowa lists many documents that are exempt from Iowa’s freedom of information statute, but ballots are not mentioned at all. Four years ago the mis-managed voting machines in Pottawattamie County led to a FOIA request, but no ballots were requested. The chance that you may win the right to inspect old ballots still in the hands of your county auditor has just gone up, thanks to the Michigan ruling.

hat tip/Jan BenDor

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

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)

Voting machines in Black Hawk County have apparently counted ballots that don’t exist. This was discovered Wednesday during a recount in the close race between Representative Jeff Danielson and challenger Walt Rogers. Seven ballots are missing. According to the WCFCourier the recount shaved votes from both candidates.

The county conducted an honest-to-goodness hand recount of paper ballots. The recount occurred because precinct pollworkers had suspected a miscount on election night. County Auditor Grant Veeder organized an investigation, laying ballots in piles and counting them twice.

Veeder says “We are still doing some checking” in an effort to explain this anomaly.

Iowa took a giant step forward in this election by doing without touchscreen voting machines. We still need to take the next step. We need post election audits during which actual cast ballots are counted by hand and compared to the machine that already counted them. In the Black Hawk case the machine looks to have failed.

Updated below.

With all the scare stories now arising about the upcoming election, it’s time to remind ourselves that Iowa looks pretty good. We won’t have (shouldn’t have) long lines to vote on election day. We won’t have any touchscreens to go awry. We won’t have many registration problems. Let’s review our enviable situation.

No Touchscreens. This is Iowa’s signature accomplishment. We owe a big debt to Secretary of State Mauro who traded in the touchscreens as his first major step in office. Now all of us get to vote on paper. Polling places can arrange as many ballot marking booths as they need to prevent lines of voters. No votes will be lost to the dastardly touchscreen gadgets. It’s because of this victory that this blog has been so quiet lately. No sense in pointing out the state’s shortcomings when such a major change has just been engineered.

No Registration Problems. Iowans can register until the end of next week. If they miss that date, they get a second chance on election day. This means hardly any provisional ballots will be needed. Everyone with a good ID card should be able to vote without any prior preparation. You can check your registration right now at this website.

The Brennan Center (with help from Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity) has released a major report on the status of election readiness. Iowa is one of eight states given credit for “best practices” in ballot accounting and reconciliation. See the third map.

On the other hand, we fall into the black space on the bottom map regarding audits of the machine readout. That’s Mauro’s next challenge. Someone needs to hand count some ballots after the polls close to see that the machines got it right in their hi-speed readings. Haste makes waste! Slow down and double check the damned things!

That challenge is for the government to face next legislative session. If we get good audits we can join the list of only six states that get shaded green on the top map (Alaska, Oregon, California, North Carolina, and our neighbors Missouri and Minnesota).

For now the voters should see a welcoming environment at the polls. Any snafus will be local–not the fault of state law. Take advantage of our enviable situation by voting.

Update: Secretary of State Mauro has also been recognized for having the best official state election website in the nation! Talk about a welcoming environment! So look him up if you need to know anything about Iowa voting. Congratulations, Michael.

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.

Last week as the legislature was dumping touchscreens and mandating paper ballots, the American Statistical Association was getting into the debate. Their board adopted a “Position on Electoral Integrity” that reminds us to actually look at the paper ballots.

“It is critical that the integrity of central vote tabulations be confirmed by audits of voter-verified hard-copy records in order to provide high - and clearly specified - levels of confidence in electoral outcomes… Certification of any electoral outcome should require substantiating evidence that the putative winner was the intended selection of the plurality of voters.

That’s a clumsy way of saying, “Don’t let the scanner do all the thinking.”

A bill to require audits languishes in the legislature today. We’ll have the ballot system we wanted but we’re still using an insecure, fallible computer to read the votes and add the votes. We need to get our pollworkers eyes involved, too.

State Representative Mary Gaskill wants to check on those computerized ballot scanners by counting 5% of the ballots by hand. She has filed a bill creating a state election audit board to oversee the process. The board would also have broad authority to review election administration in five randomly chosen counties after each general election.

Gaskill’s bill, HF 2206 is simple. Each county must hand count ballots in enough precincts to reach the 5% goal. If the count shows the machine was off by more than 1/2 % the audit would be expanded. If an actual recount of the entire race is invoked by a candidate, the audit would be unnecessary.

Not every race on the ballot will get reviewed during the audit. The bill says

The postelection audit shall be conducted for elections for the offices of president of the United States or governor, United States senator, United States representative, and at least a total of two additional partisan offices or public measures on the ballot, which shall be chosen by lot at the same time, and in the same manner, the precincts are chosen.

Such an automatic audit could have saved New Hampshire from the recount of its Democratic presidential primary last month. For now the Gaskill bill does not cover primaries, but can go into effect for November 2008 if the legislature approves. Let’s hope they do.

Media-savvy Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity took advantage of the slow pace of holiday news to get some airtime on Iowa Public Radio. He warned Iowans about those ES & S touchscreen voting gadgets that caused trouble in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Several Iowa counties use the same touchscreens, notably Sean’s own Johnson County, as well as Keokuk, Newton, Clinton, Estherville. (complete list here. Look for “iVotronic” in the right hand column.)

It seems the election workers in one South Carolina county failed to get through all 999 steps when they prepared the touchscreens for the primary voting. As a result, most of the county’s gadgets would not work when the polls opened. Voters had to wait or give up and go away.

Irony abounds. Sean and others had written all the Presidential campaigns earlier to warn them about Carolina’s wondrous paperless touchscreens. He feared a contentious result (similar to what already happened in New Hampshire) could not be resolved without a paper record of the vote. He neglected to point out to the candidates that the damn gadgets might prevent voting altogether–at least until the tech support crew arrived at the various polls with their fire hoses.

Though John McCain considered seeking a court order to keep the affected polls open past the regular closing time, most news coverage and most candidates pretended nothing happened. Just another messy election.

Is there any Hope? Yes, pencils don’t need much preparation. Audits can catch mistakes. Sean comforted his listeners by saying our home state was looking into it. The Experienced Mauro is on the case. We had our close call already. Time to fix the system. Hope and Experience together can do it.

Happy MLK birthday.

Here’s a short version of a platform plank being advocated by Iowans for Voting Integrity. The full resolution is in the comment section below, as is another resolution for auditing election returns. Take these to your caucus if you want verifiable elections.

WHEREAS, an accurate and verifiable tabulation of votes is essential to democracy, and

WHEREAS, direct-recording electronic voting machines do not allow the voters to see how their votes are recorded and do not allow for an independent recount, and

WHEREAS, experience in other states has shown that adding printers to electronic voting machines in an attempt to produce a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail fails to resolve either basic security issues or the difficulties of conducting recounts on this equipment, and

WHEREAS, voter-marked paper ballots, counted by optical scanners or by hand, provide the most reliable record of voter intent,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that we support allocation of sufficient state funds for counties to replace all direct-recording electronic voting machines with optical scanners and ballot marking devices to serve voters with disabilities, in time for the November 2008 General Election; and

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we support federal legislation allocating funds to reimburse states for purchase of optical scanners and ballot marking devices.

Two bizarre “audits” of today’s straw poll in Ames were announced –one to cast doubt on the process and one to soothe fears of skeptical voters. Neither audit could accomplish much of anything.

The official Republican “audit” was being conducted by the state auditor David Vaudt. I inquired as to how it would work. My question was answered by a county auditor who had volunteered to help out and was supervising the 6 Diebold scanners in Hilton Coliseum. He said that at some point one of the six scanners would be opened and its stack of ballots would be counted to determine that the number of ballots matched the machine’s count of ballots that had been deposited.

No ballots would actually be examined. The audit would not show that the machine had properly read the pencil mark on the ballot or that it had properly totalled the ballots marked for each candidate. It would only show that the machine contained the number of ballots that its indicator screen claimed.

Such an audit is of no help in reassuring that the count for each candidate is accurate. We want to know that the machine did NOT take every tenth Tancredo vote and move it to Mitt. Such mischief could terminate Tom Tancredo.

Mitt moved mountains to win the poll. Ron Paul supporters need to know Mitt was not able to move votes inside the black boxes. They are a skeptical bunch.

Worse than the Republican audit was the one going on outside the polling place by people in yellow shirts saying VoteinSunshine. They were conducting a non-random exit poll. They gave voters a yellow half page paper to sign. The paper said the signer was signing because he wanted the votes to be properly counted. Signers were also supposed to scribble down the name of the candidate for whom they had just voted back at the Diebold scanner. The papers were then deposited in a translucent plastic box.

According to a Wisconsin woman working on this project, these exit poll results would be counted and reported at the same time (7 pm) as the official results.

Unfortunately many voters walked past the exit poll without participating. The woman claimed Romney voters put “their noses in the air.”

So what good is this? Vote in Sunshine will have different results from the official results because some groups will be undersampled by their casual methods. For all their efforts to advocate hand counting and to insist that ballots actually be examined by citizens, their totals will be worthless and that will undermine their work.

Really good audits are not hard to do. Some fraction of the scanners would have their ballots recounted by hand. Landslide results require very small audits. Close elections require more extensive hand counting. Statisticians know how to determine the minimum size audit for any circumstances. It’s time we started this practice.

Howard Stanislevic, a computer network engineer in NYC who has been studying the intersection of elections and computers, sees a clear path ahead despite the rancor among election activists over current legislation. At his blog he has proposed these five steps, only one of which is currently met by Iowa:

1. Publicly disclose and audit all Ballot Definition Programming before each election. Follow up with rigorous Logic & Accuracy tests.

2. Aggregate precinct totals transparently and independently after posting and witnessing them at the precincts on election night.

I’m not sure how transparent Iowa’s process of tallying is, but I know precinct totals are not posted at my precinct.

3. Audit within-precinct tallies (using paper and hand-to-eye counts) with a statistically accurate, fair and efficient (SAFE) method.

You’ll be hearing more from me about these SAFE audits.

4. Follow up on any discrepancies found until correct outcomes can be confirmed with very high certainty (prior to certification of course). Ninety-nine percent has been shown to be feasible for all recent federal elections without excessive administrative burden.

5. Have plenty of paper ballots on hand in case of DRE failures (or ban the DREs altogether until someone can get them right)! The 9.2% failure rate allowed by the federal voting system standards makes DREs an unacceptable technology for running elections, especially when other methods are used in other jurisdictions within the same State.

That last one should be already met by Iowa. It’s in the code anyway.

Notice Howard can guarantee the election was properly decided even without examining source code. This avoids the problem of trade secret software, and the problem of trying to spot every possible error in the software even if it is made public.

Howard goes on to compare these five steps to current legislation (HR 811, the Holt bill). He conditionally endorses the bill even though it falls short of his 5 steps.

There is a new map at Verified Voting. It shows Iowa in red.

Red states have fallen behind in the open elections department. Verified Voting’s map used to concern itself with whether states had paper trails for their balloting. Now they have moved on to asking whether states with paper trails are conducting audits to see if the machine count actually reflects the real count on the paper ballots.

States in red (danger!) on the new map have neither an audit nor even a paper trail.

Woe is Iowa.