Iowa Voters

UPDATED BELOW—ANOTHER UPDATE–THIRD UPDATE

Washington Congressman Norm Dicks told one of his constituents that Congress was being “inundated with calls in favor of the Ban-DRE amendment.” DRE is lingo for touchscreen voting machines.

The calls came pouring in when a rumor arose that the House Rules committee would allow a vote on such an amendment when the Holt paper trail bill reaches the floor. At this writing it is unclear if the Rules committee has adopted such a rule or even if the bill will make it to the floor this week as had been expected.

So YOU have time to call, too. DREs are the evil heart of the election Frankenstein we deal with today. Every time they are investigated by impartial computer scientists, DREs flunk. They should definitely be banned.

Here’s the Rules Committee phone number: 202-225-9091

For good measure, here’s the phone of Rules chairwoman Louise Slaughter of NY: Phone: (202) 225-3615
Fax: (202) 225-7822

And don’t forget your own Representative:

Bruce Braley (202) 225-2911
Dave Loebsack http://loebsack.house.gov/contactform
Leonard Boswell Phone: (202) 225-3806
Fax: (202) 225-5608
Tom Latham– Toll Free:866-428-5642
Steve King–Phone: 202.225.4426
Fax: 202.225.3193

Let freedom ring!

UPDATE: Thursday’s New York Times has editorialized in favor of the DRE ban:

It is unfortunate that the bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. A touch-screen ban would encourage states to use optical scan machines, which rely on paper ballots read by a computer, like a standardized test form. Optical scans are less expensive and less vulnerable to vote theft.

There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting. If the House fails to do so, the Senate should, and it should fight for it to be in the final bill.

Read it here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Expect this bill to be taken up by the Rules Committee Friday morning. Call now. Ask them to allow a DRE ban amendment or even ask to have an “open rule” which will allow any amendments that may be drafted as the bill is debated.

THIRD UPDATE: Friday Rules Committee meeting cancelled. Use the extra time to tell your own Congressman what you think. They are paying attention now!

Once called HR 811, but now called Microsoft 811 by some, Representative Rush Holt’s paper trail bill is set for a vote this week in the US House. Some former backers of Holt’s efforts have jumped ship and want you to jump, too.

Many good points of the original bill are gone now:

1. Software disclosure demands got removed. The bill now bars public disclosure of software.

2. Internet connections were banned in the bill last winter, as were any type of wireless connections. Both now suffer from muddled language added in committee.

Here’s the conclusion of Ellen Theisen, an early paper ballot advocate:

In my opinion, the flaws in this bill are more damaging to democracy and our future election process than the good that might come of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our elections in 2008 and beyond. So, far from celebrating that a Holt election reform bill will finally come to the floor for a vote as I might have been back in 2003, or even 2005, I am now filled with sadness. This bill should never be passed as it is currently written.

Others still back the bill. Verified Voting (started by California professor David Dill) needed over 2200 words to explain why it backs the bill in spite of all the negative changes it has undergone this summer. Their closing words are cautionary at best:

The proposed changes to the Committee bill open the door for hundreds of millions to be spent on touch screen equipment and flawed inaccessible printers in 2008 — equipment that would need to be replaced yet again in 2012. We still believe the good in the bill outweighs these changes, but we urge Congress to implement these reasonable corrections as the bill moves forward.

So even the bills backers hope it won’t be enacted without some improvements. Typically the argument goes like this–”Pass this bill, anyway, because the Senate can do better. Then the conference committee will select the best from both bills. We hope.”

Trouble is, there is no better bill that has any legs in the Senate. There are worse bills in the Senate.

Passing what’s still called HR 811 appears to be as risky as defeating it.

Here’s a briefing on the VOICE bill by Jenifer Parsons. She produced this work April 2, 2007 for the Iowa House Democrats. Parsons is a member of their research staff. It has been shortened just a little bit by my editing.

VOTER OWNED IOWA CLEAN ELECTIONS ACT
HF 805
Current Status: House Appropriations Committee

This new Act gives candidates for public office a choice in how they fund their campaign for elective office. It is completely voluntary on the part of the candidate. VOICE provides qualifying candidates—who agree to limit their spending and reject contributions from private sources—with a set amount of public funds to run for office.

In general, VOICE candidates receive full public financing for the primary and the general elections. They qualify for funding by raising a high number of $5 qualifying contributions from voters in their districts or state. VOICE is not an attempt to patch up the current system, but instead is designed as an alternative to it. VOICE reform provides another way for candidates to finance their campaigns.

A similar law has already been enacted in Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut. New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina and Vermont have enacted the “clean money” option for some races.

VOICE has passed constitutional muster to date by working within the confines of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Buckley v. Valeo (1976). The Buckley ruling states that government can place limits on the amount of money an individual or PAC can contribute to a candidate. However, government cannot place limits on spending UNLESS public financing is offered and the system is voluntary.

VOICE is funded with $10 million from unclaimed and abandoned properties in the custody of the State Treasurer’s office. In other words, it is not funded with tax money. Other funding sources include a $5 income tax check-off ($10 joint return), voluntary contributions to the VOICE Fund with up to a $200 tax deduction, unspent seed money, and qualifying contributions.

Funding measures of the bill take effect January 1, 2008. The VOICE option for candidates does not become effective until November 3, 2010, which gives the VOICE Fund ample time to collect enough funding to become self-sustaining.

Highlights of the bill are as follows:
• VOICE Fund is a separate fund within the State Treasurer’s Office. The State Treasurer is required to annually deposit $10 million into the VOICE fund from the proceeds derived from the sale of unclaimed property. If the proceeds from the sale of unclaimed property do not equal $10 million, the State Treasurer must transfer unclaimed utility deposit refunds to the VOICE Fund.
• Candidates apply to the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Finance Disclosure Board to become a VOICE candidate by collecting a set number of signatures and $5 contributions from registered voters in their district. The contributions are deposited into the VOICE Fund.
• Qualified political parties are those whose candidates received at least 20 percent of the total number of votes cast in the previous general election. (This weeds out nonviable third parties and their candidates).
• Requires that a nonpartisan voter information program and advisory council be established by the Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board. The council is required to publish and distribute a voter information guide.
• The VOICE qualifying period begins 90 days before the primary election and ends 30 days before the primary election. It is during this 60 day window (March, April) that a candidate must obtain the necessary signatures and $5 contributions from registered voters to qualify.
• Participating candidate means a candidate on the ballot who qualifies for VOICE funding.
• Non participating candidate means a candidate who is on the ballot but has chosen to privately finance his/her campaign with individual contributions and PAC contributions, or a candidate who is on the ballot and has applied for but has not satisfied the requirements for receiving VOICE funding.
• Iowa Ethics and Campaign Finance Board (IECFB) has 5 days after receiving an application for VOICE funding to determine if a candidate has satisfied all of the requirements. If so, the IECFB provides the candidate with a debit card and a set amount of money is deposited into the candidate’s Campaign checking account.
• Allows a person to voluntarily contribute to the VOICE fund through a $5.00 checkoff on their income tax return.
• If the opponent of a VOICE candidate has decided to privately finance his/her campaign, a trigger is in place for the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board (IECDB) to release additional funds in the form of a dollar-for-dollar match up to 200% of the initial allocation to a VOICE candidate if any of the following occurs: the privately funded opponent exceeds the initial allocation, or money is spent by 527 committees or other independent groups to benefit the opponent. The IECDB will know when this is happening through additional reporting required by privately funded candidates as well as groups spending money independently.
• There is an exploratory period of 18 months (November through May). During this time, candidates decide if they will publicly or privately finance their campaign. Candidates can raise “seed” money during this time to cover any expenses associated with becoming qualified for VOICE. This is the only private money a candidate can spend. An individual cannot contribute more than $100 of “seed money” to a candidate. Candidates are limited to raising and spending seed money to become VOICE eligible as follows:

• Governor/Lt. Governor: $25,000
• Other Statewide offices: $15,000
• Iowa Senate: $ 2,000
• Iowa House: $ 1,000
• Political parties can contribute up to 5% of the initial allotment in cash or in-kind contributions to a VOICE candidate. In addition, political parties can provide a staff person to assist a candidate.

Contributors must be registered voters who reside within the candidate’s electoral district and who are eligible to vote for the candidate

VOICE funds to qualified primary election candidates; adjusted to CPI on 12/31

Office Funding Maximum
Governor/Lt. Governor $750,000 $1,500,000
Other Statewide $75,000 $150,000
Iowa Senate $22,500 $45,000
Iowa House $15,000 $30,000

VOICE funds to qualified General Election candidates

Office Funding Maximum
Governor/Lt. Governor $3,000,000 $6,000,000
Other Statewide $200,000 $400,000
Iowa Senate $40,000 $80,000
Iowa House $30,000 $60,000

Contributions Limits for Non-participating Candidates:
1. Candidates for statewide Office:
a. $1,000 in the aggregate per individual contribution.
b. $5,000 in the aggregate per political committee contribution.
2. Candidate for the Iowa Senate and House of Representatives;
a. $500 in the aggregate per individual contribution.
b. $1,000 in the aggregate per political committee contribution.

The state convention of Iowans Citizens for Community Improvement was held Saturday in Des Moines. Clean elections were a central issue for the members.

The pro-VOICE workshop was held in the biggest room. It featured a publicly funded winner from the Arizona state senate, Meg Burton Cahill. She barely upset a powerful senior incumbent of the AZ legislature on her first try for elective office. She ran with public financing. She has become so popular that in the most recent election she carried every precinct in her district, despite being in the “wrong” party for that district.

The Senator argued that current law demands two skill sets from legislators: ability to craft public policy, and ability to raise campaign money. She said these skills don’t often reside in a single person. As a result some legislators depend on party leaders to raise money for them and thus lose their independence. She also waved a brochure for an upcoming campaign workshop in DC which featured many fundraising workshops, such as “It’s All About the Benjamins” and “Give and Take, and Take and Take”.

Later the CCI members heard from former Iowa Congressman Berk Bedell. He said it’s great to work on an issue like VOICE. No politicians are against it, he noted, but added that none of them do anything to advance it.

Common Cause also sent a representative who briefly answered questions about the federal clean elections bill and referred the audience to their website for further information. Bedell said Common Cause may place full-time staff in Iowa to advance the issue.

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.

The Iowa House has passed the paper trail bill, one which leads eventually to the end of the trail for touchscreen DREs in this state. It’s a victory for good government and citizen activism.

Iowa’s bill includes $2 million to bail counties out of the mess they wandered into when they bought paperless touchscreen voting machines, known in the trade as Direct Recording Electronics (DREs). Auditors who have them must either replace them now or buy paper trail printers to augment them. They have until June 15 to make their choice. You have about half that time to make your opinion known to your auditor if you want to have an impact.

When the current touchscreens wear out or embarrass their owners by mis-performing (see North Carolina, Cuyahoga county, Sarasota, etc.), auditors are not allowed to buy anymore of them. Iowa has now prohibited both punchcards and DREs. We will have only optically scanned ballots in the sweet bye and bye.

Thanks to State Representative Mary Gaskill who led this effort in the House and to Senator Jack Kibbie whose sound bite on WOI radio in 2005 kicked off the campaign in Iowa.

Kibbie had pointed to the unresolved race in North Carolina in 2004 in which paperless voting machines lost 4,000 votes. He introduced a bill to get paper trails for Iowa. Auditors and county election directors resisted, sending Dawn Williams, Mary Mosiman and Linda Langenberg to testify against the bill. Feeling the resistance, Kibbie told his constituents to write letters to the editors of the DM Register.

During that session the Senate had its own troubles with its electronic voting board and got religion. They passed Kibbie’s bill unanimously. It stalled in the House under the influence of Langenberg’s own state representative who was chair of the relevant committee. Meanwhile Iowa auditors spent their HAVA money, buying hundreds of paperless voting gadgets.

Simultaneously Iowans for Voting Integrity was born. Their leaders spoke to State Representative Mary Gaskill, informing her that Iowa had its own expert on electronic voting in UI professor Doug Jones. Gaskill was in the minority in Des Moines, but she acted anyway, scheduling Jones for an informal discussion of paper trails at the statehouse in March 2006. Some legislators attended.

The House finally took up the bill but only because the majority Republicans hoped to use it as a way to also get tougher voter ID laws. The gambit failed. Vilsack wasn’t going to sign any such deal.

Meanwhile the news was grim for DREs. A string of studies from Blackbox Voting, Princeton University, UConn, NYU’s Brennan Center, GAO, Congressional Research Service coupled with negative news coverage from Cleveland, Chicago, Florida, California, New York, Colorado, New Jersey and elsewhere exposed the weaknesses and poor performance of the DRE technology. It was all topped off by two spectacular voting machine failures, one in Council Bluffs and the other in Florida. The Iowa fiasco in June was salvaged because there was a paper trail to recount. The Florida Congressional race in November probably sent the wrong candidate to Congress because there was no paper trail for the 18,000 missing votes.

That same November election brought paper ballot user Mike Mauro in as SoS and a Democratic majority in both parts of the legislature. The stage was set.

Mauro moved first, inexplicably appointing paper trail opponent Langenberg to be his election director. Had he abandoned his campaign promise? Maybe he had merely co-opted the auditors by bringing the critics into the tent. At any rate, he got the job done. Support for the paper trail bill remained high in the legislature and new bills were introduced.

At least one was a trick! It required printers but gave the printed ballot no role! Someone (we don’t know who it was) had tried to fool the legislators with a pretend paper trail.
A new point man for IVI, Sean Flaherty, began contacting legislators at every stage of the process.

The current bill accomodates those unrepentent auditors who won’t recognize the perils of DREs or won’t admit they erred. They can put more of our money into those gadgets via the paper trail printer contraptions. But there it ends. No more paperless equipment can be purchased.

That way we always will have something to audit. We still need audits. All these ballots are counted by computerized scanners and thus subject to hacks and errors galore. After the election there should be a system for examining ballots by hand to verify the machine’s work.

Federal legislation is pending that addresses this. Perhaps Gaskill will also address it next year. Encourage her.

Sean Flaherty, chairman of Iowans for Voting Integrity, has reported on the progress of legislation in Iowa. We appear about to phase out touchscreen DREs, but to spend more money on the dreadful DREs in the meantime by putting paper trail printers on them. It’s up to your auditor whether you dump the DREs now or pour more money down their rathole first. You should weigh in with your auditor.

Sean is thinking ahead, too, reminding us that routine manual recounts (audits!) are still needed whenever computers do the initial counting:

Iowa still has no audit requirement, and as the Brennan Center’s Task Force on Voting System Security observed last year, without an automatic routine audit, paper ballots are of questionable security value.

Sean has done Herculean work on your behalf. Send him and the rest of IVI a “Thank You”.

MoveOn has alerted Iowa subscribers to contact legislators on behalf of the VOICE bill for clean elections:

Can you imagine if Iowa’s lawmakers owed nothing to corporate lobbyists and owed everything to voters? Iowa could join the cutting-edge of truly democratic elections. And if Iowa adopts public financing this year, the presidential candidates will have to go on record about this bold reform—putting the national spotlight on Clean Elections.

Two weeks left in the legislative session.

Senate Majority leader Mike Gronstal is quoted today saying “I don’t necessarily like the rules” about political campaigns.

He’s in luck!! He can change the rules. He can bring to the Senate floor the Iowa clean elections bill we call VOICE.

If Gronstal thinks Rants has set a bad example by creating a 527 campaign organization, he should set a different example with VOICE. Merely following Rants’s lead is me-too-ism.

Carpe diem, Senator Gronstal.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way!! I know how to get the money for Iowa’s clean elections bill. And is it ever SWEET!

Look here: Plug the Wal-Mart Loophole

It’s real tax money that now gets slyly siphoned out of the state and turned into tax-free profits for Wal-Mart and other devious corporations who operate in many states. They shift their money around, turning Iowa profits into “expenses” that they “owe” to their other pockets in other states where the money is not taxed. Eventually it becomes untaxed profits.

This reform is known as “combined reporting” and it could have brought us $99 million in the year 2002. That’s FAR MORE than the ten million that we supposedly can’t find for VOICE.

We know where it is and we know how to get it. What are we waiting for, more campaign contributions to Patrick Murphy from Wal-Mart?

Use your voice on the phone to get your political VOICE back! You can join this weekend and next with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement in canvassing and calling to motivate our legislators. E-mail jessica@iowacci.org if you would like to help.

Here’s some of the options:

Phone Banks:
-Friday, April 6, 10am-noon
-Friday, April 13, 10am-noon
-Friday, April 20, 10 am-noon
-Wednesday, April 11, 5:30-8:30 pm
-Wednesday, April 18, 5:30-8:30 pm

On Saturday, April 14 and 21, there will be one group working on the phone bank and another group doing door to door canvassing. They expect to work from 10am-2pm both days.

You may be able to help even if you don’t live in Des Moines.
Get in touch with Jessica. Use your voice for VOICE.

jessica@iowacci.org

How much allegiance do legislators owe to their campaign contributors?

Essential Estrogen has chided Rep. Dawn Pettengill for her opposition to the union shop bill known as Fair Share, saying “You Gotta Dance With Them What Brung Ya.” EE points to Pettengill’s sources of campaign contributions and suggest she owes them her vote.

So contributors are more important than constituents?

Contributors are indeed out to buy influence, but legislators are under no moral obligation to sell out when they accept contributions. It’s a gamble on the part of the contributors (with the odds in their favor). How else can candidates proceed? Few candidates have such safe districts or such winsome personalities that they can forego large party or PAC contributions and still expect to beat a better-financed opponent.

If Essential Estrogen has the moral landscape right, they have endorsed a vicious circle. The status quo will keep electing candidates who were financed with special interest money until the Governor signs a new law ending the system. But we can’t get there unless legislators break out of the circle by jilting all their contributors when they vote to end privately paid campaigns. Those contributors want to maintain their influence, so all who vote for VOICE will be acting similarly to Pettengill.

Legislators who act primarily in the interest of major contributors aren’t dancing with those that brung them so much as they are dancing like puppets on a string. Is that a party candidates really want to attend?

The creative plan to elect our President without the electoral college and without having to amend the Constitution is making slow gains. Last year it passed in California but their Governor terminated it.

It has just passed both houses of the Maryland legislature. Governor O’Malley has promised to sign it, making Maryland’s ten electoral votes the first to go into the pool. Only 260 more to go.

Currently one house of the legislature has approved the plan in Colorado, Hawaii, and Arkansas. It was introduced in Iowa as a study bill, but our legislature is too busy with other election reforms to take it up this term.

UPDATE–The markup of HR 811 described below did not occur. Officially it was because of the committee chair’s illness. Some opponents of the bill claim it is because they stirred up so much last minute opposition that they threw the committee off its plans. Markup is now expected in mid-April.

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One paper trail bill passed the Iowa Senate yesterday, while another paper trail bill gets committee action in Washington tomorrow(see below). There is some risk to Iowa in this timetable, as the federal bill appears to ban what Iowa may decide to do.

Congressman Holt’s HR 811 appears to ban the reel to reel paper trail printers that use thermal printing. These are called “toilet paper” printers by critics because of the reel and the low quality product. If Iowa requires printers to be installed by next year, we will likely have to buy the toilet paper version. Then we will have to replace them with newer, better printers to meet federal law should HR 811 pass with this required improvement.

The safe way down this trail is to switch now to voter-marked paper ballots with ballot marking machines for handicapped voters. Then we’ll be ready for the federal bill with no additional disruptions or new equipment needed.

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The House Administration (full committee) is planning to markup Rep. Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 (HR. 811) on Thursday, March 29th at 10am. Any letters in support of or opposition to this bill should be addressed to House Administration and faxed to them today or tomorrow so they can be inserted in the Record. The fax numbers for the committee are listed below. The letters can be the same letters you have been sending to your Congressional delegation, simply readdressed to Chairwoman Millender-McDonald and Ranking Member Ehlers.
Members of the Committee on House Administration
Democrats – Fax Number 202-225-7664
Republicans – Fax Number – 202-225-9957

It passed 45-5. It spells the end of touchscreen voting in Iowa, since current equipment can be replaced only with scannable paper ballot systems. That’s good news.

Unfortunately there’s more. The bill allows the new paper trail to be “machine readable” as well as visually readable by real people. This opens the door to misuse of the paper trail, wherein one set of software creates the trail and another set of software reads it. If no one’s eyes are ever employed to examine the paper and compare it to the alleged vote tally, we are hardly better off than we were.

Besides that Rep. Libby Jacobs has filed an amendment to gut the bill when it comes up in the House. She wants to use the ephemeral “electronic ballot image” as the official ballot and ignore the paper trail altogether. Why order the purchase of printers at a cost of a million dollars or more only to ignore the trail they print? The Jacobs amendment is a monkey wrench being thrown into the gears of democracy and an insult to all concerned.