Iowa Voters

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.

Why are so many things secret about the elections? THe secret software that runs voting machines isn’t the only thing being kept from the public:

Debate watchdog group Open Debates calls on the Commission on Presidential Debates to make public the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Senator Lindsay Graham of the McCain campaign and Representative Rahm Emanuel of the Obama campaign have negotiated a detailed contract that dictates the terms of the 2008 presidential debates, including who can participate and the structure of the formats. The Commission on Presidential Debates has agreed to implement the debate contract.

Yet, in order to shield the major party candidates from criticism, the Commission on Presidential Debates has refused to release the debate contract to the public.

”It is vital that the public has full access to information in a sound democracy,” said George Farah, executive director of Open Debates. “Unfortunately, the Commission on Presidential Debates is more concerned with the partisan interests of the two candidates than the democratic interests of the public, and it has denied voters access to critical information about our most sacred political forums.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates was created by and for the Republican and Democratic Parties. In 1986, the Republican and Democratic National Committees ratified an agreement “to take over the presidential debates” from the League of Women Voters. Fifteen months later, then-Republican Party chair Frank Fahrenkopf and then-Democratic Party chair Paul Kirk incorporated the Commission on Presidential Debates. Fahrenkopf and Kirk still co-chair the Commission on Presidential Debates, and every four years, it implements and conceals contracts jointly drafted by the Republican and Democratic nominees.

A copy of the 2004 debate contract negotiated by the Bush and Kerry campaigns is available at:
http://www.opendebates.org/news/documents/debateagreement.pdf

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One secret is out: They are keeping Libertarian Bob Barr off the stage despite public support for including him. He’s on the ballot in most states.

Hal, the 2001, A Space Odyssey computer with a mind of its own, is apparently lurking in some ES & S voting machines in Arkansas. They took votes from one race, assigned them to a candidate in another race and produced the wrong winner.

Worse than that: they reassigned the votes to a race that had been omitted from the ballot!

Here’s the deal. The touchscreens were programmed erroneously such that one race had been omitted. It would not appear on the screen, so voters could not vote in that race. The county noted the error and compensated by using regular old paper ballots for the one missing race.

When the election was over the touchscreens reported their votes. They claimed to have votes for the race that never appeared on the screen. Enough extra votes to make the loser into the winner. Thanks, Hal!

Luckily these errant computers produced a paper trail. Close comparison of the paper to the touchscreen totals showed no votes for the missing race on the paper trail since no one had been able to vote in that race. However, the total in a different race was low compared to the number of plainly visible paper trail votes. The two discrepancies were–voila–the same amount! When the votes were reassigned back where they belonged, the correct winner was restored to both races.

Aren’t you glad Iowa is getting rid of its touchscreens?

Those candidates looking for a recount in Iowa’s primary had better be on their toes when they go looking for possible errors in the count. There are many ways to get the wrong totals.

Thanks to Iowa’s new voter registration law, you can vote June 3 even if you are not now registered. Just register at the polls. Or go to the county auditor’s office today to vote absentee (after you register under the new law).

These late registrations have tougher rules because you must prove your identity and residence in the precinct. Use your driver’s license or other government-issued photo id card. If the card shows an incorrect address, you can use other documents to establish your address: your lease, utility bill, bank statment, government document, or paycheck that shows your address.

OR — Get This!–go without any papers at all! Just go with another registered voter from your precinct and let that person swear you are who you say and you live in the precinct. This is so cool that I’m tempted to try it. I just need to find an unregistered voter who wants to vote in my singularly lackluster primary.

If you want to hear it from the Secretary of State, go here.

It’s hard to keep a lid on information in the age of the internet. Steve King and the English-only crowd should learn their lesson.

The Iowa voter registration forms are again available in multiple languages. While the Secretary of State is forbidden by law from providing them to citizens, others can offer them. The Iowa Council for International Understanding has put Spanish, Bosnian, Laotian and Vietnamese versions of the forms on its website. The ICIU has long provided translation services to Iowans.

These are unofficial forms. They cannot be turned it to the voter registration office. They can be used only as an aid in completing the actual form which is also on-line here.

From the AP in Indiana:

By DEBORAH HASTINGS

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”

Representatives King and Latham joined 85% of the Republicans in the US House yesterday to vote down a paper ballot bill that could have re-imbursed Iowa for the expense of replacing our touchscreens.

Democrats tried to pass the bill under a suspension of the rules, a maneuver that requires a 2/3 majority. Such smooth sailing appeared possible because the bill had passed out of the House Administration committee unanimously. This time the same committee Republicans voted against the bill!

There were no mandates in the bill, only incentives for states to use verifiable methods of balloting, re-imbursements for new equipment, and money for auditing election returns.

He signed the bill that chases DRE touchscreens out of our state. He’s a better governor than he was Secretary of State.

Thank you, Governor Culver.

Secretary Mauro was on the radio yesterday, taking an hour long victory lap over this and same day voter registration. He’s a very credible Secretary of State with nearly 25 years of election administration under his belt.

Thank you Secretary Mauro.

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.

The House has followed the Senate, voting for paper ballot systems througout Iowa. The bill protects our next Presidential election from the terrible touchscreens:

Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary, for elections held on or after November 4, 2008, a county shall
use an optical scan voting system only. The requirements of
the federal Help America Vote Act relating to disabled voters
shall be met by a county through the use of electronic ballot
marking devices that are compatible with an optical scan
voting system.

It’s nice to see how non-controversial this has become. Although there was a grumpy editorial in the Dubuque newspaper this week, the current news story at the DM Register has not even drawn any anonymous comments as of this posting.

The Governor’s signature is expected in due course.

The Iowa Senate has taken us halfway out of the paperless touchscreen trap on a 47-1 vote for an all paper voting system. Jennifer Jacobs has the story.

One legislator said on the radio today that we are hereby modernizing our voting system. That sounds like a refrain from just 3 years ago when we were suckered into new touchscreens–the “modern” system of its (brief) time.

Jacobs reports that touchscreens “have fallen from favor in the last couple of years as watchdog groups rail about equipment failures and security vulnerabilities.” She ought to say that the really credible watchdogs have been computer scientists. And they were “railing” in plenty of time to have avoided this whole fiasco, had the election officials been listening.

Michael Mauro listened. He never fell into the touchscreen trap. Now he is getting us out. Next step: the Iowa House.

A new bill approved by committee today in the Iowa Senate moves us much closer to paper ballots. Senate Study bill 3262 mandates paper ballots for the fall election and the state picks up the tab!

This goes a step beyond previous plans passed last spring to phase out touchscreens as they wear out. That bill also required paperless touchscreen terminals to have printers added to them. Arguments over the cost and who would pay for the printers, as well as over the poor performance they have showed in other states, prompted Governor Culver to flirt with a vote by mail system instead of buying more equipment to replace our 2005 purchases.

When the all mail ballot idea was panned by the state’s auditors this winter, Culver agreed to fund ballot marking devices for all counties that preferred them to touchscreen printers. Today’s legislation amends last year’s Iowa law by phasing out the touchscreens after September’s school board races.

No doubt the recent revenue estimate for the state has made this move much easier–state tax collections are exceeding expectations

From Jennifer Jacobs for the Des Moines Register today:

Gov. Chet Culver is backing down on his plan for updating Iowa’s election technology after weeks of disagreement over how to ensure a paper trail for every voting machine.

Culver said Friday he is now willing to use state money to help counties switch to one uniform system with paper ballots.

And at long last, Culver criticizes touchscreens:

Touch-screen machines are “not the best options, and I’d like to try to avoid it if we can,” Culver said.

Thank you, Governor Culver. And Secretary Mauro.

Now the ball is in the county courthouses. Will those who fell for touchscreens realize that not every county made that mistake and therefore the counties bear some financial responsibiltiy?

Once those touch$creen toy$ are gone from the polling places, we will face the fact that all this money has been spent for “acce$$ible” voting equipment that sits unused. All to satisfy a federal mandate that was pushed through by voting machine companies who are the principal winners in this story. Beware the lobbyist with something to sell!

What a sad state of finger-pointing we have come to regarding Iowa’s tarnished election administration. In the Sunday Des Moines Register Governor Culver blames counties for the paperless voting machines he let them buy when he was Secretary of State. Story county auditor Mosiman defends her purchase, saying she acted on information available at the time.

They both need better alibis than that.

There was plenty of information available at the time (here, too, and here). If auditors and then Secretary Culver had paid more attention to computer experts like our own Doug Jones in Iowa City, we could have avoided this mess. Instead Mosiman went to Des Moines to testify against a paper trail bill. Auditors listened to savvy salesmen who managed to make those paperless touchscreens work long enough to close the deal. And besides, it was only tax money, much of it coming from the feds.

Culver’s correct that counties made the actual purchase decisions. He’s right that he (belatedly) urged them to have some sort of paper trail. But he was timid as a pussycat, never speaking against touchscreens. Worse than that, he even asked Professor Jones to resign from the Board of Examiners of Voting Machines during the crucial decision making period. Jones had single-handedly protected Iowa from Diebold during the many years he was on the board.

Culver should not prevent the legislature from mopping up. He should tell our Congressional delegation to back the Holt bill that would bail us out of our troubles (with yet more federal money).

Mosiman and the other county auditors who fell for touchscreens should admit that they were not paying adequate attention to the critics who sought to warn them before they spent the money HAVA provided.

Kiss and make up, you two. The legislature is trying to help.