Iowa Voters

Wendy Barth, Green Party candidate for Governor, and her running mate Richard Johnson, both more knowledgeable about computers than most Iowa county auditors, have jointly rebutted the comments of Linn county auditor Linda Langenberg:

In a recent news article Langenberg referred to those who raise concerns about the accuracy of electronic voting machines as “terrorists.”

“As a career software engineer, I understand just how easily errors in programming code can be overlooked,” Barth responded, “and how difficult it can be to thoroughly test a piece of software this complex. In addition, it has been demonstrated by several testing groups that these machines can be compromised rather easily. Given this the concerns of the public are legitimate, and are deserving of consideration by the Auditor. I understand that Ms. Langenberg feels she deserves to be trusted, but the voting public deserve more reassurance than a simple ‘trust me.??

Barth’s running mate, Richard Johnson, added, “Having spent the last fifteen years of my career as a network engineer I can assure you that the risk of intrusion into these computers is real. There are documented instances where the computers controlling these voting machines have not only been “hacked,” to use the popular term, but where results have been changed without the operators being able to detect it. I cannot understand someone dismissing these threats so lightly.”

Recent testing by Princeton University
(http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting) has demonstrated how vulnerable these computers are, and how easily intrusion into these computers can be hidden. There have also been numerous reports of errors from these voting machines reported in Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. A number of states and counties are requiring that the machines have a verifiable paper trail that includes a receipt for the voter and a printed verification report.

At a meeting of supporters in Cedar Rapids earlier today, Barth announced, “Our campaign is calling for an independent audit of the code used to program these machines by qualified software engineers, as well as a real paper trail with receipt that can be verified by the voter as they cast their ballot. Every electronic cash register in the state prints receipts, so why not our voting machines? It is inexcusable that the gambling equipment in our casinos, which must pass regular independent inspection, is subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than our voting machines.”

Linn County auditor Linda Langenberg lashed out at voting machine critics in Tuesday’s Cedar Rapids Gazette, saying they engage in ” a form of terrorism.” She went on to add, “It’s making people lose confidence in the voting system without getting the other side from voting officials.”

Imagine that: We are unable to hear the government’s side of the argument.

Lucky for Langenberg, Gazette writer Dick Hogan reported ONLY the government’s side in his story, referring to criticism of the voting machines as “stories and rumors”. Rumors to him, maybe. He should read this blog. Or those linked on the sidebar of this blog.

And what was the Langenberg side of the story?

— That “electoral votes are never on the voting machines” and therefore it was foolish for the Diebold CEO to pledge to deliver Ohio’s votes to Bush in 2004.

— That her machines are never connected to the internet and therefore they are safe.

— That she doesn’t even use the machine modem to report results over the phone from polling place to courthouse.

Langenberg’s reassurances carry exactly as much weight as you would expect from someone who bothers to say that electoral votes are not on the voting machines.

Langenberg has not been keeping up with the news. Her Diebold ballot scanners were hacked in Florida last December, and her Diebold touchscreens were hacked by Princeton computer scientists this summer. On the 4th of July Blackboxvoting.org published complete directions on how to commandeer a Diebold touchscreen. None of these attacks required use of the internet.

Langenberg asserts, “The whole key is access (to the machines),” which she promises to strictly control.

No thanks, Ms. Langenberg. The whole key is public participation in vote counting. No one can see the machine count votes, so keeping it locked up is not reassuring to us critics.

And what is with this “terrorism” charge? Just yesterday on National Public Radio a member of the federal Election Assistance Commission said voting machine critics were “bomb throwers.” Such name-calling shows the defenders of paperless voting machines have little left to say for their products. So they resort to slander.

Did you know that once voting machines are publicly tested and are all set for the election they then get sent home with pollworkers for several days? It’s called a “sleepover” by critics of the practice. And it will still be permitted if the new Iowa rules proposed on Aug 30 go into effect unchanged.

It has become a well established fact that electronic voting equipment is hackable. Its been proven by computer scientists numerous times, most recently this week at Princeton.

Iowa and other states have reacted by slapping security tape on the most obviously vulnerable parts of the machine to “protect” against surreptitious entry. Then they continue the old practice of sending voting supplies home with the pollworkers.

Sleepovers were harmless when we began election mornings with an empty aluminum ballot box and a stack of paper ballots. Any pollworker could see that the box was empty and the ballots were still pristine.

Nowadays nary a pollworker can tell if the programming has been altered on an electronic ballot counting scanner or touchscreen. And what about the security tape? Here’s the observations of pollworker and computer scientist Avi Rubin from this week’s primary in Maryland:

Nothing happened today to change my opinion about the security of these systems, but I did have some eye opening experiences about the weaknesses of some of the physical security measures that are touted as providing the missing security. For example, I carefully studied the tamper tape that is used to guard the memory cards. In light of Hursti’s report, the security of the memory cards is critical. Well, I am 100% convinced that if the tamper tape had been peeled off and put back on, nobody except a very well trained professional would notice it. The tamper tape has a tiny version of the word “void” appear inside it after it has been removed and replaced, but it is very subtle. In fact, a couple of times, due to issues we had with the machines, the chief judge removed the tamper tape and then put it back. One time, it was to reboot a machine that was hanging when a voter was trying to vote. I looked at the tamper tape that was replaced and couldn’t tell the difference, and then it occurred to me that instead of rebooting, someone could mess with the memory card and replace the tape, and we wouldn’t have noticed. I asked if I could play with the tamper tape a bit, and they let me handle it. I believe I can now, with great effort and concentration, tell the difference between one that has been peeled off and one that has not. But, I did not see the judges using that kind of care every time they opened and closed them. As far as I’m concerned, the tamper tape does very little in the way of actual security, and that will be the case as long as it is used by lay poll workers, as opposed to CIA agents.

So Rubin has said the tape provides no security even at the polls. Think how much less good it does during a four day sleepover.

Tell the Secretary of State that we have outgrown sleepovers now that we have high tech vote manipulating devices instead of aluminum ballot boxes. Send comments on the Aug 30 rules to sos@sos.state.ia.us and put “Comments for Sandy Steinbach” in the subject line. Comment period ends Tuesday.

The new rules proposed last month fall short when it comes to touchscreens (DREs). Here are three specifics:

1. A few conscientious auditors bought printers that create voter-verifiable paper trails (see this map), but there is no Iowa law on how to use them. The new rules tell these auditors to stick their heads in the sand. They say the paper trail must be sealed up immediately after the election. It must be destroyed after a given period as other ballots are destroyed. It must never be looked at!!!

This probably means no auditor will hook up the printer after this. To do so would be to deceive the public into thinking the paper provided some backup. We ought to scrap this new rule and have a different one: that paper trails may be unofficial records but they can still be used in unofficial audits to make sure the machines are behaving. At least the auditors would know and that is something.

2. When touchscreens are tested before the election, they are often tested in “test mode” instead of “election mode”. They don’t behave the same in both modes, as I witnessed in the Pocahontas county test in May. Official testing should be done in the same mode that will be used on election day, not in the mode used at the state fair booth to “WOW” the public.

3. There is no requirement to report how many votes have been cast on paperless DREs and how many were cast on paper ballots that went into a scanner. There should be, so that we can know the size of the problem of paperless voting in Iowa.

You can comment on these rules until Tuesday. Tell the Secretary of State to a) make good use of the paper trails while we pound on the legislature to pass a paper trail requirement; b) test equipment in election mode; and c) report the extent of touchscreen use.

Comments go to sos@sos.state.ia.us. Put the name of Sandy Steinbach in the message or the subject line.

When the county election officers prepare their equipment they run test ballots through to see if the machines still can read and count. Since few counties actually do their own ballot and scanner configuration, this testing is the only way to know if its been done correctly by the subcontractor. If the testing is inadequate, you can get Pottawattamie’s problem. If you don’t have a voter-verified paper trail, you are screwed.

Thankfully the Secretary of State has now proposed rules for these test ballots. The rules require the testing of every touch screen being used, rather than just one per precinct. They also allow “Members of the public, working with a person designated by the commissioner, [to] provide a written test plan and test the operation of the DRE voting machines.”

You should support this aspect of the new rules during the public comment period which runs only until Tuesday. Contact Sandy Steinbach at sos@sos.state.ia.us to endorse thorough test ballot rules.

Updated Below–

Two years ago Pocahontas county auditor Margene Bunda vowed to buy a new voting system that had a paper trail when she spent her HAVA money. And she did, sort of.

We wound up with paper ballots AND vapor ballots (with no voter-verified paper trail) in every precinct. Hmmm.

Then we had our first election on the new gadgetry in June. The pollworkers were pretty obviously steering the voters to the paperless vote manipulating device called a touchscreen. When it was over, Pocahontas county had a high rate of paperless voting.

Today in our uncontested school board race the only paper ballot in sight hung on the front door. It was the sample ballot. Inside the poll only the touchscreen was available. A $4,000 computer to tally one uncontested race.

Meanwhile in Maryland, where they also use only paperless touchsreens, no polls were able to open in the whole of Montgomery county. Someone forgot to send all the pieces out to the polls, so the gadgets were unuseable until mid-morning. Here’s an eyewitness account.

Maryland could be our future, too.

Update: Here is another eyewitness report from a different Maryland county with different problems. It is by a computer scientist who is a poll worker.

Last week Secretary Culver trumpetted his plan to accept email ballots from military voters but neglected to mention that email ballots are not secret ballots. Now his press spokesman adds that Iowa does not even recommend email balloting. They merely allow it.

Here’s spokesman Casey Sinnwell at the Iowa Secretary of State’s office:

It is important to understand that the email voting option for active duty military personnel involves, at the choice of the voter, the express waiver by that voter of ballot secrecy.

It remains the policy of this office that active duty military personnel should make use of the standard mail-in absentee ballot voting process wherever possible.

If it was “important to understand” this fact, how was it omitted from the original press release?

While most of Iowa’s press repeated the AP story linked above, the U of Iowa’s student paper (where I once worked!) actually contacted a medic in Iraq:

Spc. Jason Weirather, an Iowa National Guard medic stationed in Iraq, said, as a soldier, he finds this new method more convenient, but, as a civilian, he is leery about the possible risks involved. . . .

“I’m wondering what’s stopping some nefarious person from reading my ballot or worse, changing my vote.”

The 25-year-old said if he votes overseas, he will continue to use the Postal Service because he doesn’t fully trust that e-mail will be secure.

The secret ballot has been a key part of our elections for a hundred years. With the Secretary of Defense calling his critics “appeasers”, soldiers might want to hold on that secrecy

The Iowa Secretary of State yesterday published proposed new rules for counties to follow when they prepare voting machines for the next election. The rules detail what test ballots must be used and also split the pre-election testing of the machine into two parts. Ballot scanners and touchscreen terminals are treated separately. These rules look like an effort to prevent Pottawattamie’s error from recurring.

The rules also deal with “inactive” voters, paper trails, recounts, and election day equipment failures.

But here’s the most important part:

Any interested person may make written suggestions or comments on these proposed amendments through September 19, 2006. Written suggestions or comments should be directed to Sandy Steinbach, Director of Elections, First Floor, Lucas State Office Building, Des Moines, Iowa 50319.
Persons who want to convey their views orally should contact the Secretary of State’s office at (515)281–5823 or visit the Secretary of State’s offices on the first floor of the Lucas State Office Building. Requests for a public hearing must be received by 4:30 p.m. on September 18, 2006.

So speak now. Or stick around for observations that I will post, and then speak your piece. Public comment periods are the guts of democracy in a bureaucracy. I’ll bet you can comment by email if you put “public comment to Sandy Steinbach” in the subject line. This address appears on the state department’s website :
sos@sos.state.ia.us

You can find the proposals in the Administrative Bulletin here, but you must look way down the page for the Secretary of State (721) portion. It begins at their page 307 and continues to 313.

It must make a difference who the auditor is when a county faces optional paperless voting. The rate at which voters used the paperless machines when perfectly good paper ballots were at hand varied ENORMOUSLY from one county to another in the June primary.

In the average county with both paper ballots and paperless touchscreen terminals about 27% of the voters were suckered into using the less desirable paperless method, according to a survey by Iowans for Voting Integrity.

In Scott County, where Karen Fitzsimmons is auditor, only 1.7% of the votes were cast on touchscreens. Fitzsimmons wins the prize for keeping this technology in its place.

On the other hand, in Emmet county,where Beverly Juhl is auditor, 75% of the voters used the touchscreen. That’s the highest rate in the state.

How can this be? Maybe you think the big urban eastern Iowa county (Scott) just has a different culture from the small rural northwest Iowa county (Emmet). Forget that explanation: right next door to Emmet county the voters of Dickinson county used the touchscreen only 5% of the time. I’m pretty sure the cultures of these neighboring counties are similar.

In general the less populated counties saw a higher percentage of the vote go paperless. In bigger counties a voter may have to wait in line to use the only touchscreen. In deserted precincts like Laurens, the touchscreens had the appeal of a new toy. Still, some rural counties–like Mills and Decatur–kept the touchscreen totals to 5% or 6%. I’m guessing that has something to do with their auditors, Carol Robertson and William Greenwood.

Actually I tried to find out what auditor Juhl and her neighboring auditor Nancy Reiman of Dickinson county had to say about the big difference between their two counties. Neither responded to email inquiries.

This is a long story. It has mostly played out elsewhere on the web. Since I played a small part and since it involves Iowa’s election director Sandy Steinbach (see here ironically), I think it is worth posting for Iowa readers. It is about the programming of voting machines that we use in Iowa; about a lawsuit in California, and about correspondence with the Iowa office of the Secretary of State. Here goes:

It all started on the web when John Washburn posted some emails at his website. The emails came to light because of legal action in California regarding how that state had decided to approve the use of Diebold voting machines. But these emails refer to the other major voting machine company–Omaha’s ES & S–whose wares are used in Pottawattamie, Polk, Johnson, and other counties.

The emails are written by voting machine examiners for the National Association of State Election Directors(NASED). They worked under the direction of Sandy Steinbach, then chair of the NASED Voting Systems Board and long time election director for Iowa. Steinbach has praised their work:

“Brit Williams, Paul Craft and Steve Freeman are my heroes. These three men are the heart and soul of the voting system testing program and they do this work for free. None of them has a salaried position. They work as consultants and their time is valuable.

One of the emails indicates that there is virtually no way for a user of ES & S voting equipment to know whether the proper software is running on the equipment.

Every time pests like me cast doubt on computerized voting devices, the defenders say, “Don’t worry, the software has been certified by an independent laboratory,” thus making it sound like it has earned the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, or something. The point of the email published by Washburn is that the certified software is altered every time it is used. Thus it cannot claim to be certified any longer and it is virtually impossible for the user to know what has been changed.

This alteration occurs during the creation of every ballot that is prepared for use on ES & S devices. It wouldn’t have to work like this, but the oracles of Omaha designed it this way, so it does.

When Washburn posted these once private emails back in May, he concluded that the ES & S system always operates on uncertified software, and thus always in violation of the standards that supposedly protect us from vote manipulation by the machinery. His conclusion was sent to the NASED president and to Steinbach and others, but they did not acknowledge receipt.

Eventually a response was wrung from Iowa Secretary of State press agent Casey Sinnwell. It is posted here, and it addresses the question, “Does ES&S routinely use uncertified software to run elections?” Sinnwell’s answer is No, but to be sure you must be able to stand on your head and swallow swords while reading heiroglyphics. Or, as he put it–

To verify the software requires using a master copy and a copy of the election definition, then creating a reference copy of the specific election program to compare against the version used in the election. The technique is slightly more difficult because some EEPROM burner/readers create or fill blank areas with different characters and the sections need to be checked to verify that they are true fills. However, the technique has been used in Florida and other locations and the version of the software verified. . .

The problem is that the ES&S system can not be verified with a simple comparison, . . .

I was not reassured by this, so I wrote back to Sinnwell asking about the description of his method as “difficult” and “has been used in Florida” and “cannot be verified with a simple comparison”. I asked if it was fair to assume that county election officials would not be able to routinely make this comparison for their various ballots and thus would not know what the hell was actually going on in their vote counting gadgets. Sinnwell has not responded.

Washburn then went on to create a glorious picture of what this means. His comparison of ballot preparation with paint mixing leads even a technophobe to understand why it would be so difficult to tell whether the vote counting program has been corrupted in the process of creating the ballot. He says that a program (green paint) that is prepared by mixing the ballot information (blue paint) and the certified program (yellow paint) will yield a different shade of green for each ballot. But the bystanding auditor cannot unmix the paint to see if the proper portions of blue and yellow were used. This gem about 47 shades of green is hidden in the lower part of this post.

Slogging thru all this analysis is work. Probably no one but the auditors themselves has the motivation to puzzle it all out. But as Cerro Gordo’s auditor Ken Kline (a user of ES &S, by the way) once told me, “I didn’t get elected to do an ‘easy’ job.” Amen.

The Register reports that Polk County recorder Brien has put his money where his mouth is. He’s posted $10,000 to get a recount of his apparently decisive defeat. He’s hoping lightning struck twice on June 6, since he knows the Pottawattamie county recorder and other candidates also were “defeated” in initial returns that were actually erroneous.

The Pottawattamie returns were so egregious that they were noticed right away. So far Brien seems to be the only one who suspects error in Polk’s results, and he admits he has no evidence for his suspicion. But his recount will provide us with the sort of audit that should routinely happen when machines do the counting. Too bad he has to pay for it himself.

Pottawattamie County has received an open records (Iowa Code Chapter 22) request regarding its erroneous early election returns for the June 6 primary. You may recall that county auditor Marilyn Jo Drake didn’t believe the numbers reported by her voting machines, so she counted all the ballots by hand the next day. She thus proved the machine counts were incorrect.

This week John Washburn, a Wisconsin software tester and author of a paper on how to create test ballots, made his request for 188 items. He believes the machines were not adequately tested prior to the election. He has requested the election definition software file for each precinct’s scanner, the deck of test ballots used for each scanner, the sample ballots that hung on the wall in each precinct, and the results tape printed out in each of the various polling places as the staff tried to wrap up their work after 9 pm June 6.

He failed to ask for documents that would show those poll workers saying, “@h,M?G@D”, “~onofab!t(h”, or even “WTF?” when they saw the tape alleging that Sal Mohammed had won so many votes in their very own precincts. Open records requests are such dry business.

Drake’s office told Washburn they would gather the requested materials as quickly as they can.

Just a year ago, with Culver, Blouin, and Fallon already in the race,Democratic state senator Michael Gronstal was contemplating a run for Governor. But it didn’t work out.

Instead Gronstal organized three quarters of the Democrats in the state legislature to join him in a simultaneous endorsement of Mike Blouin. But that didn’t work out either. Blouin came in second.

On June 17 Gronstal arrived at the Democratic party state convention, expecting to hear Chet Culver celebrate his victory, only to be greeted with picketers on the sidewalk carrying signs aimed right at him. (The signs concerned possible override of a vetoed bill on eminent domain.)

Senator Gronstal probably wasn’t feeling much appreciation as he sat with three other members of the Pottawattamie delegation in the mostly empty chairs before the convention began. It was then that I approached the group looking for assistance.

Wisconsin software tester John Washburn is planning a public documents request in his study of what went wrong in the Pottawattamie ballot counting on June 6. Washburn needs a helper in Council Bluffs to collect the documents and mail them to Wisconsin.

When I stated my request for such a courier, Gronstal promptly offered to do it. Great! A top legislative leader will soon have his hands on the documents that show what went wrong in his own county’s election. Maybe this will help us get verified voting in all Iowa counties.

If Gronstal can get that done, he’ll at least have my appreciation.

Western Iowa’s Congressman Steve King has helped stall the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. King wants to remove a provision that requires ballots be prepared in other languages if more than 5% of the voters in the jurisdiction routinely speak the other language.

This probably doesn’t happen in his district. He says it is an unfunded mandate and a divisive practice that runs counter to the melting pot theory of American history. Eighty Representatives joined in King’s effort.

One must be a citizen to vote. And to become a citizen one must show proficiency in English. So why do any voters need non-English ballots? Judiciary chairman Sensenbrenner points out that anyone BORN in the USA is a citizen, even if born to non-citizen parents or Indian or Alaskan native parents who don’t speak English. He says most of the voters who don’t speak English were born here. So this is not a case of pandering to foreigners unwilling to learn the dominant language. It is a case of accommodating our citizens who have the freedom to speak whatever language they want.

Thus opponents of current hispanic immigration have joined old racists of the South to derail one of the proudest pieces of federal legislation—the bill that ended literacy tests and other roadblocks to voting. House Republicans never bring up a bill unless it is supported by more than 50% of the Republican members. That appears to be the bump in the once smoothly paved road to renewal of the VRA.

How bizarre! Two county recorders ousted by newcomers in two elections run on the same type of voting equipment on June 6?

Well, no. We know the Pottawattamie recorder actually won his election. The Pottawattamie people saw their mistake on election night. It affected every race on the ballot. It was easy to spot, perhaps because long shot Sal Mohammed was also getting lots of votes when he got so few in every other county.

The ballot scanners had been set up incorrectly.

But now Polk County’s recorder is claiming his defeat may be explained the same way. Why this claim took over two weeks to surface is only one of the mysteries here. Another is whether bad blood between the defeated (?) recorder and the county auditor may be affecting the call for a recount.

Luckily both counties had paper ballots to re-examine. Polk County auditor Mauro has always said it is foolish to run an election without paper ballots that would enable him to “re-create” the election.