Iowa Voters

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.

If the store clerk says your lottery ticket was not a winner, should you just shrug and walk away? If the paperless voting machine says your campaign for office was not a winner, should you concede the election?

What’s the difference between these two events?

We now know some Canadian store clerks claimed winning lottery tickets for themselves after telling customers the tickets were worthless. That’s pretty much what happened in the election in Sarasota, Florida in 2006. Some paperless voting machines told candidate Jennings that there were not many votes on the machine for her. In fact, she probably was the real winner of the election.

Iowa’s solution is to create a better paper trail for the lottery tickets. Make customers sign their tickets before the clerk gets them. That signature prevents the clerk from claiming the winnings after mis-informing the client that the ticket was “worthless.” The clerk can’t very well turn in “his” winning ticket if it has someone else’s signature on it.

Always have a paper trail, in lotteries and in elections.

These aren’t works of art, now, just work-a-day looks at the actual caucus, collected here in the interests of open and transparent vote counting methods.

See actual Republican vote counting here (21 seconds) and here (31 seconds) and buried in the middle of this long one from Shenandoah.

See voters being recruited by a Des Moines group that is too small to be viable here (65 seconds).

Here’s an insider’s view of realigning and here’s a chairwoman carefully explaining why her caucus group must realign (90 seconds).

Finally here’s a Des Moines caucus condensed to four minutes. Nice work by the editor of this video.

If the Iowa Republican results are not yet available in more detail than we see here, then those results are not quite transparent. Somewhere someone had to add together the various precincts to get these county totals. No precinct can tell if the addition was correctly carried out because all the precinct numbers are unavailable. Have I missed the rest of the data somewhere?

This falls short of what the Dems have done.

Sorry but there will be no video posted from my caucus. There were only 12 persons in the Havelock Methodist Church and most said they did not want to appear on a YouTube video. I think most did not know what a YouTube video was, exactly, but they understood that they could get some notoriety and they were not so inclined.

My son attempted to shoot the proceedings anyway, keeping the camera on me all the time. It’s no fun to watch me while I listen to the debate about who is the best candidate, even though parts of the debate are clearly audible. So move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Meanwhile the Democratic reporting system is WAY COOL!
Look it over if you haven’t done so. We got feedback to our caucus within minutes of our report because a man in NYC was watching the internet and phoned to tell us what it showed. He said we were the first precinct in our county to report. He read back the results to us because we did not have a computer or internet connection there in the church. Thanks to Howard S. for that help.

The Republican straw poll will be posted precinct-by-precinct on a board at the the Polk County Convention Center tomorrow night. It will be potentially possible to verify the whole Republican vote process. This news came to me second hand (Thanks SF) from a voting integrity activist extraordinare.

A Republican caucus attendee must see the votes counted at the local precinct and then must see the totals board in Des Moines. That is not practical for most people, but campaigns can at least design phone trees for themselves if they want to have some feedback to the precincts about what got posted in Des Moines. Maybe someone can shoot a video of the big posting board every 15 minutes and put it on You Tube. It may not be as cool as what the Dems have done, but it has fewer layers of software, so that’s one advantage.

Update December 31, 2011–The link below was abandoned by the Iowa Dems and has since been claimed by the casino industry. I never posted a video as promised below because the people at the caucus were camera-shy.

The Iowa Democratic Party has created a website that will show caucus results for each precinct as soon as they are reported to Des Moines via telephone. This is a virtual paper trail for this event, and very good news.

http://www.iowacaucusresults.com/

This practice is known as aggregating the vote in public. It is recommended by the DNC here. All counties should do it in every election. That is to say, they should promptly publish the precinct totals to the web on election night, right after they post the totals in the window of the precinct polling station. The Iowa Democratic Party is leading the way. Let’s hope the new Secretary of State (a Democrat) follows suit in June for the primary election.

I already announced my intention to post a video of my caucus on YouTube. Part of the video will show us phoning in the results of the delegate selection. I’ll also get someone who is not at the caucus to send back the results as soon as they appear on the internet. We’ll have confirmation that the world knows our outcome. That will be on the video, too.

You Tube and the Des Moines Register have teamed up to host your video about the Iowa caucus in your precinct. Go for it!!! Lights, camera, action!

Here’s what I hope to see. Make sure to carefully identify your precinct and county at the beginning of your video. Include a scene of the caucus result being phoned in to party HQ. Get close enough to hear the caller and hope he (she) talks you through the call as various buttons are pushed for each candidate.

If you do that, the Iowa Democratic caucuses will be completely transparent. That’s our goal here at Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections. IDP intends to have a website that will report results precinct-by-precinct. The video will attest that the web results actually happened. One part of the internet will be checking on another part of the internet. It’s a new form of checks and balances.

This won’t work for the Republican caucuses since all their results go into a back room somewhere and get totalled up by cigar-chomping hacks—er—by devout deacons of the party faithful. Anyway, you can’t check or balance what they do. But you can still post a video of your caucus. I look forward to seeing some.

I’ll try to get my son to record the caucus in this precinct. I’ll have a link here as soon as he gets it posted.

Even I don’t agree with this Iowa caucus participant, but it’s nice to see the voters haven’t forgotten about our problematic voting machines. Look at this report filed from LeMars–

Claire Packard is an undecided voter. “The biggest issue I think is the voting machines and the progress that government has to make to get them up and going next year.”

Luckily the caucusses don’t use voting machines, so Iowa has a little more time to get ready. Voter Packard may be aware of the turmoil over voting machines that has rocked California, Ohio, New York, and Colorado in recent months. All’s quiet in Iowa, though, as our auditors try to implement our new paper trail law in a way they can be proud of. Stay tuned.

Iowa’s Democratic Party will take a big step forward in election reporting on January 3, 2008. They will report results from each precinct on a website. Caucus attendees will not have to wonder if their results were correctly tallied by some black box at the other end of the phone line used for reporting the winners.

Like in 2004 the precinct chairmen will use a touchtone phone to enter their results without actually talking to anyone at party headquarters. In 2004 there was no way to know if the phone system properly recorded or tallied the results. That will change in 2008, according to Carrie Giddens, communications director, who wrote this Friday:

The Iowa Democratic Party will have a public website displaying the caucus results as they are reported by each precinct. This website will show a number of things but will include the number of county delegates won by each candidate in each precinct, which will allow anyone around the world to see the caucus results down to the precinct level.

This follows the advice of the DNC in this document about public aggregation of election results.

I don’t know the website address yet or how timely it will be. I was told the techies at the Iowa Democratic Party were concerned that they might need an inordinate amount of bandwidth just to accommodate all the curious websurfers who would hit the site on caucus night. The real purpose of the site is to verify the vote for the candidates and the precinct people who phoned it in, but many stay-at-home types (and many Republcans) will be checking on their local result, so this seems like a realistic fear. Here’s hoping they have figured out how to handle it. And congratulations to them for making the effort.

How long before the Republicans can match this?

Poweshiek County auditor Diana Dawley saved money for the small towns in her jurisdiction Tuesday by letting them count paper ballots by hand. The alternative would have been to pay for programming of touchscreen voting machines.

Before the voting Dawley told the Grinnell Herald-Register

We don’t anticipate high voter turnout because there’s not much competition in the smaller communites this time, and we felt it could be a cost savings to the cities to use paper ballots instead of having the voting machine cards programmed for the election.

It just seemed to make sense to simplify things . . . A lot of people would like to get back to paper ballots.

Cheaper, simpler, popular. What’s not to like?

[Thanks to B.B. for finding this story in the Grinnell paper, which is not on the web.]

Our former Secretary of State, having overseen the purchase of new voting equipment during his tenure, NOW wants to reconsider. He seeks our opinion of a vote-by-mail regime as a way to (1) solve the paper trail problem and (2) boost turnout. Democrat Gronstal nods, but Republican Zieman resists.

Why didn’t Mr. Culver mention this when he was SoS? Because he was so intent on succeeding Vilsack as Governor that he dared not make any waves. Instead he concentrated on saying what good elections we ran in Iowa, and on boosting turnout with cheerleading and absentee ballots.

He let counties spend their federal money on paperless black boxes masquarading as high tech election equipment. Last spring he cut money from the state budget that could have solved the paper trail problem by eliminating the touchscreens. As a result many counties will be adding poor quality printers to their dubious touchscreens. This is mal-administration.

Moving to all mail voting will mean ditching the touchscreens, which should be done, of course. But moving to scannable paper ballots in the touchscreen counties is a far simpler and cheaper way to get a paper trail.

Will turnout be higher? If we want high turnout we need high stakes elections where people see a reason to vote. My hometown saw its turnout triple on Tuesday as the mayor and one councilman were ousted in a blue collar revolt.

If we want higher turnout, we could try public financing of some races. (Are you still there, Mr. Gronstal?) That gets new candidates who are barred by the present need to raise money just to run for state representative.

So I’m with Zieman on this one. Zieman said

“Having worked with Governor Culver on election reform, there’s always a motive to his madness.”

I wonder what it is.

A new report from Iowans for Voting Integrity reveals that more than 1500 votes disappeared into a black hole during the 2006 Governor’s race. It happened because voters used touchscreen voting equipment.

The report shows a dramatic difference between voters using paper ballots and voters using DRE touchscreens sold by Diebold or ES & S. In counties where all ballots were paper, 99% of those ballots showed a vote for Governor. (Something goes wrong on the other 1%. Some voters make too faint a pencil mark; some voters circle names instead of filling in the circle; some voters may even skip the race. It’s rare to get every ballot to count.)

In counties where all votes were recorded by touchscreens, there were twice as many missing votes for Governor because the DREs showed a vote for less than 98 of every 100 voters who had the misfortune to try voting that way.

That’s about 1500 missing votes if we examine just the precinct totals in counties using all touchscreens in every precinct.

Other counties have both paper and touchscreens in every precinct. About half a million votes were cast for Governor in those counties. An unknown number of voters were beguiled into using the touchscreens. Presumably their votes went missing at the same rate as elsewhere in the state. That means more missing votes.

Don’t forget that the 2000 presidential race in Iowa was decided by only 4000 votes.

Here’s an irony for you. Following the disputes of 2000, Democrats hopped on the touchscreen bandwagon due to all the uncounted votes. Democrats feared their voters were being left behind, notably in St. Louis. They thought touchscreens would eliminate the problem because nothing could go wrong with electronic ballots. Voters couldn’t accidentally skip a race. Voters couldn’t mismark the ballot. Voters couldn’t fold, staple or mutilate the touchscreen. All they had to do was touch the screen and the vote would be in the bag!

Now this Iowa study and an older New Mexico study have shown that touchscreens increase the number of missing votes. New Mexico reacted to the news by going to all scanned paper ballots in 2006. Iowa should do the same.