Iowa Voters

Though the paper trail bill appears to be dead for this session, one can never be sure. “The dead can rise again,” according to Representative Delores Mertz. “Especially around Easter time,” she added. Dead bills come back as amendments to live bills. Or–get this–if they are reincarnated and sponsored by party leaders, they are exempt from so-called funnel rules.

All the leaders voted for the paper trail at one time or another. So they surely could revive SF 351 as a leadership bill and call it up for a vote. I’m not holding my breath. With the House’s Operation CYA an apparent success, I expect we will have to wait until next session to revive our effort.

Barring an election embarrassment, I am happy to wait. This paper trail debate has been over for two years already (we won), according to Electionline.org. And the debate must be over in Iowa, too, as no one criticized the idea in either house.

Next year we can ask for even more. We will seek a bill that has voter-verified paper ballots, plus open source (or publicly accessible) software for electronic vote counting, plus random audits after statewide elections, and also stricter rules for testing of equipment both before and after the votes are counted.

Pull out the law books and sharpen your pencils. We have legislation to draft. The next session begins in nine months.

In a disgusting, audacious, undemocratic and irresponsible display of irrational law-making, the Iowa House of Representatives has passed a bill mandating both paper trails and photo IDs at Iowa’s polling places.

Despite a 98-0 vote on the paper trail portion of the bill, we may be no closer to getting them. That is because the House also voted 51-48 (along party lines) NOT to pass the paper trail part by itself. Such a vote would have sent it quickly to the Governor’s desk since the Senate passed its bill already, also without dissent.

Linked to the poison pill bill for photo identification, the whole thing is likely to die. The ID portion of the bill was opposed by the Secretary of State, AARP, Governor’s Developmental Disabilities Council, ACLU, ISEA, IFL-CIO and by every House Democrat. Senate Democrats will likely keep the bill from passing there.

So do House Republicans want paper trails and verifiable election equipment, or not? Not one legislator in either House has voted against the paper trail language. But every House Republican agreed to sacrifice the good idea in order to advance a bad idea.

This was irresponsible because there is overwhelming public support for paper ballots.

This was audacious because the Republicans never even tried to make the case for requiring voters to show photo identification. When asked for cases of fraud that could be prevented under this bill, they did not answer.

This was irrational because Iowa law already allows pollwatchers to challenge suspicious voters and also allows election workers to seek identification from unfamiliar voters if they see fit.

This was undemocratic because it will reduce voter turnout. Up to ten percent of the electorate may lack ID cards. Shut-in voters now need their own photocopier at home so they can include a copy of their ID card with their absentee ballot. Since ID cards are not free, requiring one may constitute a poll tax which is prohibitted by the 24th Amendment.

This was disgusting because now all members of the body can say they voted for paper trails and both parties can blame the other for the bill’s ultimate demise.

Disgusting, undemocratic, audacious, irrational and irresponsible. Not a bad day’s work.

The Iowa House of Representatives has scheduled a debate this afternoon on the paper trail issue. But there is a catch.

Deputy Secretary of State John Hedgecoth told a radio audience this morning that the paper trail bill–which is supported by Secretary Culver–will be unwisely linked to a bill requiring voters to present photo identification.

Hedgecoth said the issues are distinct and he urged the legislators to vote separately on the two questions. He pointed out that elderly voters who no longer drive cars may not have a photo ID card. He also said tying the two ideas into a single piece of legislation makes for an uncertain future for the bill. On the other hand the paper trail bill alone could easily be enacted yet this week, he claimed.

The politics here are obvious. There is overwhelming public support for voter verified paper trails in electronic voting. The idea also has research evidence to back it up.

There is much less support for carding voters like young beer buyers and hardly any evidence to buttress the case for it. People in Iowa do not impersonate other voters. When asked for evidence by members of Iowans for Voting Integrity, the Representative advocating ID cards failed to cite any. So proponents of tough ID laws are hoping to hitch a ride from good government activists and computer scientists.

So the legislature should give SF 351 an up-or-down vote as Hedgecoth recommends. Iowa should close this loophole in its election integrity.

Iowa paper trail advocates are planning to meet state legislators Wednesday to make the case against paperless voting. They will be led by voting machine expert Doug Jones of Iowa City.

Jones is a professor of computer science and former member of the Iowa board of voting machine examiners. He has consulted with election officials in Arizona, Florida, Panama, and Asia, and testified before Congress.

The meeting will be in room 102 at noon. Please ask your legislator to attend. Please attend yourself! Please come early (10:00 a.m.?) and spend the morning telling legislators about the meeting while simultaneously making your own case for trustworthy voting procedures such as paper ballots and random audits of ballot counting machines.

The Iowa House is currently blocking a bill that would require paper trails from all Iowa voting machines.

This event is an outgrowth of a column in the Des Moines Register by Carole Simmons which appeared last Saturday.

If there is enough participation and energy left over late in the day, perhaps it can be directed to the Des Moines offices of our Senators and Congressman Boswell. There is a roll for federal legislation, too, and none of the three have so far done their share to advance it.

Some Iowans want to reduce voting. Being holier than thou, they would cut out the votes of sinners. No doubt this will end sin and make us all holy again.

Thankfully this self-righteous bill needs the signature of Tom Vilsack, who knows that Many Voices Make Wise Choices. Everyone should vote.

Lynda Waddington of Marion, Iowa has created the leaflet we need for advocating transparent elections in Iowa. She says over 5,000 people have downloaded it from the web since she produced it last fall.

It advocates for paper ballot trails in electronic voting and it was designed just for Iowa. It tells the story of the Iowa legislation known as SF 351. It puts the burden for its passage squarely on the Republicans who control the state government committee of the Iowa House of Representatives. They have refused to act on the bill, despite its unanimous passage in the Iowa Senate. The leaflet names the members of the subcommittee with jurisdiction: Libby Jacobs, Carmine Boal, Mary Gaskill, Sandy Greiner, Todd Taylor, Linda Upmeyer, and Roger Wendt.

Take this to your next city council meeting, political caucus, county convention, candidate forum or county supervisors meeting. Send a copy to your legislators or your auditor or your newspaper editor. Put one on the library bulletin board or give one to the social studies teacher at school and another to the people who run your polling place. I plan to take it to a candidate forum in Spencer next week.

A link to it will appear in the column on the right. Thanks, Lynda!

County auditors throughout Iowa have spent a pile of money for new voting machines that take the state deeper into the shadow of paperless voting. Seventy counties now will “record” at least part of their votes in a way that many voters distrust, on touchscreen computers with no paper printout for the voter to verify. See this map (pdf).

Before the Help America Vote Act provided all this money, only 15 counties used paperless computers.

This shadow grew despite a raging national controversy during the time these machines were being purchased. It happened because the auditors blocked SF 351, a bill requiring a paper ballot. It happened despite a call from the Secretary of State for the bill’s passage, a plea from voters at HAVA hearings last spring, and a joint letter from the Secretary and the Governor backing paper ballot trails. It happened despite independent reports from the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Carter-Baker Commission questioning computer security and recommending paper records.

Earlier this week VotetrustUSA.org offered us Iowans an easy-to-use email program for asking our state legislature to pass the bill we need, SF 351. Please take this action. Make the sun shine on Iowa’s ballots.

Iowa’s legislature failed to enact a voter verified paper ballot bill last year because our county auditors opposed it. According to State Representative Jeff Elgin and several county auditors, the House State Government Committee got these messages:

* auditors wanted no more mandates
* paperless DRE machines were already working just fine in Spencer and elsewhere
* the bill “does not do what you think it does.”

The bill had started off strong. Senate Co-President Jack Kibbie told reporters on the opening day of the session that a spectacular failure of electronic voting in North Carolina had his attention. Even though it was 2 months after the election, a statewide NC race was undecided because a paperless voting machine had failed to record 4,000 votes.

Kibbie introduced a bill to require paper ballots be produced by DRE computers. It blasted through the Senate 48-0. One Senator admitted to me that the Senate had experienced its very own electronic voting equipment failure right there in the chamber. I’ll bet that got everyone’s attention. They could imagine how embarrassed those Carolinians must have been.

But the auditors struck back. They employed an old theme in Iowa politics–local control, sometimes expressed as “No Unfunded Mandates!” Kibbie’s bill did not contain new money for buying printers for every DRE already in use. Clay county’s auditor even hinted at a HAVA hearing in 2003 in Spencer that they were jealous that other counties would get new voting machines paid for by federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) money, whereas Clay county had spent its own funds for its touchscreen DREs.

Marshall County election director Dawn Williams told legislators that voter verified paper was a “flawed” premise because the paper would be “produced from the very same software that records the vote electronically”. She said better technology would be coming in the future, but the current technology is “an incredibly expensive placebo.”

Most auditors ran for cover. Some would not answer emails about the subject. Some said they would get paper for their counties, but they would not back any mandate. After all, the chair of the Iowa auditors association was that touchscreen pioneer from Clay county.

Very near the end of the legislative session, after all the HAVA hearings across the state, Secretary of State Culver weighed in. He said the topic most often raised at the hearings was by voters wanting to see their vote on the paper. He called for the passage of Kibbie’s bill, but nothing happened.

The Holy Grail of paper ballot legislation is HR 550. It is a US House of Representatives bill, introduced by New Jersey’s Rush Holt, a physicist from Princeton. The bill has garnered 159 cosponsors in the House. But none of them are from Iowa.

Holt’s bill does more than require that voters be able to see their votes appear on paper. It also requires election officials to check on the initial machine totals by comparing some actual ballots to the results reported by the machine.

There is no good argument for opposing this bill, except that it may require new equipment and more work by election officials. But it will restore confidence in ballot counting. That confidence is now eroding. We want trustworthy elections, not cheap and easy ones.

There hasn’t been much point in hectoring our Congressional delegation about their lack of interest in this bill. This holy grail was in Bob Ney’s committee and he clearly was not planning to drink from it. With Ney stepping aside this week and a genuine scientist in charge of the committee, the bill has another chance.

That means we have work to do. It is time to contact our Congressmen and find out why they have not yet co-sponsored this ballot protection bill. Why has Steve King sponsored a weaker bill? Why are Leach and Boswell both silent?

Put your own insights in the comments–no registration required.