Iowa Voters

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.

Update: Loebsack is a co-sponsor of Holt’s bill.

A new federal bill could resolve the tension between two of Iowa’s top Democrats–the Governor and the Secretary of State. Today’s Register reports that Mauro wants to get all our votes on paper ballots, but Culver is content to buy “paper trails” for the tempermental touchscreens that now infect the state’s polling places.

It’s a question of money (big surprise!). The good stuff that Mauro wants costs $10 million. Culver is content to waste $2 million on the widely cussed paper trail printers.

They should put their egos aside for a minute and agree on one thing: to call on our state’s Congressmen to support the brand new HR 5036. That new bill by New Jersey’s Rush Holt pays for replacement equipment when states wise up and dump their DRE touchscreens. It is not a mandatory bill, so there is only one point of contention: Do we have the money in the federal budget to mop up the mess HAVA made of voting machines all over the nation. States that are loving their mess don’t have to do a thing. States that are ready to wash up can have the soap paid for by the Congress that caused this problem in the first place.

None of Iowa’s Congressmen have signed on to this bill yet. I called Latham’s office in Fort Dodge this morning. Can you do your part?

Boswell in Des Moines (toll free) (888) 432-1984
Braley in Davenport: (563) 323-5988 or more choices
Latham in Ames: 515-232-2885 or tom.latham@mail.house.gov
Loebsack: email or in Cedar Rapids 319-363-2288
King on the web or in Sioux City call 712.224.4692

As New Jersey enacted an exemplary election audit law and New Hampshire waded into another recount, Computerworld reporter Todd Weiss called Iowa to ask, Can audits restore confidence in elections? His inquiry is “Today’s Top Story” at the Computerworld website.

Weiss already knew that real paper ballots had saved Pottawattamie County in the 2006 primary when Auditor Drake turned off her errant scanner machines and counted ballots by hand.

Our Secretary of State Mike Mauro told Weiss

“I think there’s a place for post-election audits, where they are randomly selected, and of a certain percentage of the vote, to look for anomalies,” Mauro said. “It will [be] up for discussion this year. We will be discussing it this session.”

“First, we’re trying to get everybody across the state on the same machines first,” he said. Some Iowa counties are using optical-scan machines while others use DRE machines or a mix of the two. The goal is to move toward 100% use of optical scan machines, in part because such machines provide a verifiable paper trail.

“Random audits, of a certain percentage, I’m not opposed to any of that” to ensure accurate and fair elections, he said.

Parts of New Jersey’s law are being crafted into an Iowa bill. Next time Computerworld calls Iowa, here’s hoping it’s because we are more like NJ than like NH.

Two local election officials quoted in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald have tried to discount the striking undervote study released last week by Iowans for Voting Integrity. Both made comments that suggest they have not read the study.

Delaware County Auditor Carla Becker said “I don’t think they are allowing for voter discretion or apathy when it comes to some races. . .Judges’ elections are always the worst.”

Maybe so, but the study did not cover judges races. It covered only the race for Governor. It’s not likely that voters in touchscreen counties were so apathetic that they skipped the top race at twice the rate of neighboring counties where no touchscreens were used.

Tom O’Neill, Dubuque County deputy commissioner of elections, was quoted as saying “Iowans for Voting Integrity are concerned about undervotes, saying the touch screens are dropping votes, but they have nothing to back that up.”

Yes, they do. They have the study. It’s short. Read it here.

O’Neill went on to add, “I’m not convinced that the machines are doing it. It could be voter mistake.”

Yes, it could be. Does O’Neill approve of equipment that appears to cause so many mistakes? Why should his Dubuque county results show an undervote rate of less than one percent while neighboring Jackson county’s undervote rate is four times as high at 3.1 percent? Is it because Jackson county’s befuddled voters make more mistakes–or because Jackson county uses only touchscreens?

There’s also real news in the Telegraph-Herald story. Reporter Mary Rae Bragg reveals that counties cannot buy paper trail printers for touchscreens because the voting machine companies have stopped selling them! The vendors blame the uncertainty of pending federal legislation.

That’s just as well. Paper trail printers for touchscreens are a poor substitute for the real thing–paper ballots marked by voters. All counties should switch to that.

The judge handling Congressman King’s lawsuit against Chet Culver over English-only voting has recused herself. It’s a question of campaign finance and an argument for public financing (VOICE).

The judge (or her spouse) gave a lot of money to Chet Culver when he ran for Governor. She should not be hearing a lawsuit against Culver.

I dare say she (her husband?) should not be contributing to candidates for Governor. If we want equal justice in the courts, we can’t have judges financing candidates in the other branches of government. We don’t make our judges run for office (another case when Iowa’s system is the national envy). We shouldn’t make any candidates rely on contributions that generate such conflicts of interest.

Public financing is in the public interest. In campaign financing it is Arizona and Maine that are being envied by the nation.

Two Cleveland, Ohio, election workers got the maximum 18 month jail sentence Tuesday when they were sentenced for rigging the recount in 2004. The judge said he thought they were still protecting someone.

One outside investigator seems to agree:

Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter, appointed as an outside investigator to look into the election board in Cleveland, told that judge that the women had been uncooperative in the investigation and appealed for prison time for both.

“The defendants have never come clean,” he said.

The two women were supposed to randomly recount ballots in the Kerry-Bush race but they wanted to avoid the extra work so . . .

Prosecutors said the employees broke the law when they worked behind closed doors three days before the Dec. 16, 2004, recount to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand so they could avoid a lengthier, more expensive hand recount of all votes.

Paper trails are worthless if election workers act like this.

Iowa’s election director Sandy Steinbach has been contradicted in a report to the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The report resulted in the exclusion of Ciber laboratory from its previous role as an independent testing authority(ITA) dealing in voting machines. Ciber has “tested” all of Iowa’s voting machines, according to Steinbach.

In a January 8, 2007 email to me, Steinbach said Ciber was no longer allowed to test voting machines merely because some administrative hurdles had not been cleared. She wrote:

Ciber applied for EAC certification. The reason that the Ciber did not receive EAC certification was the administrative requirements. Ciber’s technical capability is not in question. You can verify this by calling Brian Hancock at the EAC.

But the newly released report says Ciber’s technical capability is in fact the problem. It says Ciber cannot show it follows its own testing protocol and that:

“CIBER has not shown the resources to provide a reliable product. The current quality management plan requires more time to spend on managing the process than they appear to have available and it was clear during the assessment visit that they had not accepted that they have a responsibility to provide quality reviewed reports that show what was done in testing. The ITA Practice Director indicated during the assessment that their difficulties were that corporate CIBER did not allow for the personnel resource time for quality management functions . . . .

Worse than that, the report says Ciber admitted :

. . .that the testing for a product tends to either use vendor developed tests or new tests developed specifically for the product – they have no standard test methods defined. This makes their testing dependent on the vendor input and vulnerable to unique vendor interpretations . . .

In short, the feds now know that the so-called independent testing authorites, who provide a patina of legitimacy for secretive computerized voting machines, are not independent, not doing the testing, and not authorities of any sort. We critics have been saying that for years. Give us ten more points. Score now at 193-0.

The report had not been made public when Steinbach wrote her email. It became public when New York officials threatened to subpoena it.

The most puzzling part of this report is its reporter, Steve Freeman. He once served under Sandy Steinbach when they both dealt with the ITAs for the National Association of State Election Directors(NASED). Why is Freeman criticizing Ciber now after years of accepting their work at face value? Perhaps Steinbach has already explained. In her email she lamented:

Our reviewers spent literally thousands of unpaid hours and accomplished a great improvement in the quality of voting system reliability. . . .Did we have the formidable resources now in the hands of the EAC? No. Given what we had to work with the NASED program accomplished a great deal. It was not perfect. NASED, fully recognizing our own limitations (no budget or paid staff, with voluntary standards that we had to beg for years to have updated, neither the authority nor the resources to go in and audit the labs) worked for many years to gain federal interest in the voting system testing process.

So Ciber was the wizard of Oz, hiding behind a curtain of proprietary secrecy, doing wonderful things for vendors and fooling the NASED volunteers, including Steinbach. I wonder if she feels betrayed.

California’s Senator Dianne Feinstein has begun inquiring about the so-called independent lab that has tested all of Iowa’s high tech voting machines. Thus has the concern of voters (driven by computer scientists, activists, and bloggers) reached at last to the top of the Washington scene.

In a letter to the Election Assistance Commission, Feinstein asked

why the Commission failed to notify election officials or the public about a serious problem with Ciber Labs of Colorado, one of three major labs that tests much of the nation’s software used in voting equipment.

Senator Feinstein also asked for information regarding what went wrong at Ciber Labs to warrant its loss of accreditation.

You can read the Senator’s entire letter here. It’s a virtual FIOA demand from the Senate Rules Committee to the EAC.

Meanwhile another prominent Senator has taken up another favorite topic of IowaVoters: the public financing of election campaigns. Dick Durbin of Illinois will propose federal legislation for clean elections similar to those now held in Maine and Arizona for state offices.

It’s a bit of a relief to hear that our new Secretary of State took office today promising to work for a paper trail in Iowa voting booths.

To be sure, it was his main campaign promise. But his appointment of Linda Langenberg as his deputy in charge of elections raised doubts regarding his committment. In October Langenberg accused voting machine critics of practicing a “form of terrorism.”

Mauro also was quoted as indicating the paper trail “allow[s] election officials to audit results.” Let’s hope he means what this should mean: That he wants to check the paper results against the computer count in a routine way every election.

Meanwhile real reform advocates have moved beyond the paper trail solution. Election officials have opposed paper trails as unworkable and reform advocates are adopting that view. Reformers say real paper ballots are the only reliable ballot, whereas officials are still largely content to do nothing about the problem they have bought in to.

So watch out, Secretary Mauro: Paper “trails” may be yesterday’s news.

The voting machines that lost 18,000 votes in Florida last month will be examined by Iowa on Wednesday in Des Moines. Get your tickets here:

*********************************************
Notice of Meeting
State of Iowa
Board of Examiners
for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems

Date: Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Time: 10:00 am
Place: Office of the Secretary of State
First Floor, Lucas State Office Building
321 East Twelfth Street, Des Moines 50319

Agenda: Examination and Testing of Election Systems & Software Voting System Unity 3.0.1.1 & AutoMARK v 1.1, NASED #: N-2-02-22-22-006, consisting of the following components:
1. AutoMARK
2. iVotronic
3. iVotronic RTAL Booth
4. Model 100
5. Model 650

For Additional Information Contact:
Sandy Steinbach, Director of Elections
Office of the Secretary of State
Lucas State Office Building
Des Moines, Iowa 50319 (515) 281-5823
*******************************************

Members of the board include Michael Mauro (unless he has resigned now that he’s SoS-elect) and Pottawattamie’s auditor Marilyn Jo Drake.

The RTAL is the paper trail device for the ESS touchscreens. Johnson county wanted to buy this but it was not certified by Iowa for the recent election. Looks like it will try to become certified now.

Ivotronics are the machines under scrutiny in Florida for losing 18,000 votes and throwing a Congressional race into doubt.

You can go to this meeting, but the room is small, so arrive early.

Today’s New York Times has an article about the inevitability of more changes to voting machines that rely entirely on software to run elections. Of course, the article includes one Texas election official who drags her feet on the paper trail question by saying:

“Every time you introduce something perishable like paper, you inject some uncertainty into the system,” Ms. Kaufman said.

Which is more perishable:

Dead Sea scrolls or Diebold software?

The Technical Guidelines Developement Committee(TGDC), which was created by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to advise the federal Election Assistance Committee(EAC), has proposed an improvement in voting machine design. Yesterday they said–unanimously–that elections must not depend on software.

They propose that any voting equipment that gets certified under the 2008 standards must have a paper trail or some other safety feature that is not based on software. They said you can never be sure about software. They must be terrorists!

The proposed change must go through a public comment period, if the EAC agrees to adopt the TGDC’s advice

An outspoken opponent of paper trails has been appointed to oversee Iowa elections by the newly elected Secretary of State Michael Mauro. Mauro promised to get paper trails during the campaign.

It’s Linn county auditor Linda “You Terrorists!” Langenberg who has been promoted to the role of deputy secretary of state. In October Langenberg said voting machine critics were practicing a “form of terrorism” in their campaign against paperless voting. During the 2005 legislative session, Langenberg was accused by a knowledgeable source of being a principle obstacle preventing progress toward a paper trail.

Her October remarks have just drawn this belated response from Green party’s candidate for Lt Gov, Richard Johnson:

Needless to say, I was rather surprised that you, a county auditor, were so poorly informed regarding the potential hazards of these paperless electronic voting machines you were defending. I responded, along with my running mate Wendy Barth, to your comments by mentioning how easily these small computers can be compromised, or “hacked” to use the vernacular.

The article further states, Ms. Langenberg, that you believe that because these machines are never connected to the Internet they are safe from such problems. Having spent nearly a quarter century working with computers, with the last fourteen as a technology coordinator in a school with some 400 computers connected to our LAN/WAN, I can assure you that lack of Internet exposure is no guarantee against problems. . . .
Ms. Langenberg, by comparing those of us who question the reliability of paperless electronic voting to terrorists, and by accusing us of undermining voter confidence in the system, you have done the citizens of your county, and even the state, a grave disservice. . . .[T]hose of us questioning this “advancement” in voting systems do not wish to undermine voter confidence. We want to build that confidence by insuring that elected officials, such as yourself, both understand the problem and take action to prevent a similar incident[a reference to the current missing votes in Sarasota–ed] from happening in our state or, more specifically, in your county.

Looks like Johnson held his ire too long.

This is no way to improve elections, Mr Mauro. Can you explain this appointment?

Winnebago county auditor Jen Fqelstad told the local newspaper that she’s not bothered by the lines at her polling places. Voters had to wait for each other to use the touchscreen terminals because that is all they use in Winnebago county:

. . . Fjelstad said she felt the election went well, especially considering it was the first major election in which the new touch-screen voting machines were used.

“There were lines, but people have to realize there were lines before, too,” she said before adding that the county surpassed state code for the number of machines it must have on hand.

Under state law, polls must have at least one voting booth for every 350 voters who cast ballots in the last election. Fjelstad said the county had one machine for every 250 registered voters in each precinct.

I don’t know why “there were lines before.” In the past the county had paper ballots. They must have had a slow sign-in process at the polls, or were too cheap to set up enough voting booths.

Turnout this time was 50 percent. Expect longer lines in 2008. Plan to vote absentee or to ask for one of the emergency paper ballots that are available at every poll. Either way, your vote will be on paper. You’ll be protected from the fiasco currently playing out in Florida.