Iowa Voters

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.

The VOICE bill is in a House Appropropriations subcommittee of Jacoby, Oldson, and Roberts. My apologies to Dwayne Alons for mistakenly directing email to him instead of to Rod Roberts of Carroll county.

Rod.Roberts@legis.state.ia.us

I’ll be asking Rep. Roberts if he supports giving all Iowans a VOICE instead of just a vote.

No reply so far from Rep. Oldson of Des Moines. I’ll try again.

Jo.Oldson@legis.state.ia.us

Johnson county state representative David Jacoby says HF 805 (VOICE bill) is “darn good” and he is “not opposed”.

He did not say he would do anything to advance the bill out of his subcommittee of the appropriations committee, but I didn’t ask that. I slipped up by merely asking if he was opposed to the bill. (Also see comments in the previous post.)

He noted, however, that finding the money to fund the bill means something else won’t get funded. I can see everyone ostensibly supporting clean elections but not actually enacting the legislation out of cost concerns. Jacoby says something else will have to get cut. Surely he means something will get a smaller increase, since the state budget revenues are growing sharply.

I think clean elections will pay for themselves once they get going. If legislators don’t have to do favors for contributors, the state coffers should be easier to manage. Those private campaign contributions don’t look like state money, but they often get repaid with state money–either tax cuts for special groups like factory farms or pork barrel spending like the Iowa Values (corporate welfare) Fund.

In the mean time, bite the bullet: fund the future with clean elections. It’s your move, Rep. Jacoby. Advance the bill.

Readers can encourage him via this address:

David.Jacoby@legis.state.ia.us

Here’s the full email from Rep. Jacoby:

“I am not opposed to the bill. It is a darn good bill.
The policy section needs some clean up (a little too complicated). The bottom line is where to find $ 10 million (at least) in the budget. No proponent of the legislation has offered an idea of what area to cut. The $ 10 m does come out of the general fund and will directly affect someone else.

Dave

And now the BAD news. Two reports in the last two days of Democrats opposing clean elections legislation that has already passed the state government committees in both House and Senate.

First I heard it from Senate President Jack Kibbie, speaking in Pocahontas Thursday night. Kibbie backed the bill but said it had opponents “even in the Democratic Party.” sounding surprised. He didn’t say if they were senators or representatives.

The next morning Ed Fallon emailed his I’m For Iowa followers saying “leadership” was seeking to smother the bill in another House committee. Fallon says a House appropriations subcommittee currently has jurisdiction. It has only three members–David Jacoby, Jo Oldson and Dwayne Alons.

Will they do the dirty deed? Do they themselves oppose the bill? I plan to ask them. If you ask–if they answer you–let me know.

David.Jacoby@legis.state.ia.us
Jo.Oldson@legis.state.ia.us
Dwayne.Alons@legis.state.ia.us