Iowa Voters

Given a choice between the familiar paper ballots and the exotic vote-manipulating devices known as touchscreens, what did Iowa voters do on June 6? How many voted on paper and how many tapped their choices to the man (?) behind the Diebold screen and then left the polling place without knowing whether their vote had been recorded anywhere?

Soon we will know, thanks to the efforts of Iowan’s for Voting Integrity. They are asking 56 county auditors for the numbers of votes cast on paper as well as on the touchscreens. Those counties offered both voting systems in each precinct. Early responses indicate wide variation between counties, from a low of 13% voting the paperless way to a high of nearly 75%.

In the other counties voters have no choice. Some have all paper ballots while others have no paper ballots at the polls.

The Secretary of State does not collect this information. Unfortunately some auditors have balked at answering the survey.

by Sean Flaherty

If you live in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District (or for that matter, anywhere else) and you are concerned about election integrity, thank Congressman Leonard Boswell (contact information). Boswell became H.R. 550’s 191st co-sponsor last week (list of co-sponsors). H.R. 550, as is often said on this blog, is hands down the strongest election integrity bill yet proposed in the U.S. Congress.

Susan McAvoy, Rep. Boswell’s legislative director, said in a telephone call today that Boswell has watched with growing concern the voting problems across the country, and sees an urgent need for Congress to act to ensure that our election results are accurate. Another important fact: “It’s a bipartisan bill,” she said, and added that there is a realistic chance of it reaching the floor.

It is indeed bipartisan, with a cosponsor list that includes Republicans as diverse as Appropriations Committee power Frank Wolf of Virginia, Iowa’s moderate Jim Leach, and the very conservative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. The bill would govern federal elections only. It would require a voter-verified paper record of every vote and establish that the paper record would also serve as that official ballot in a recount. It would also require a hand audit of at least 2% of the precincts in the nation, including one precinct per county. Under 550, voting system software would have to be publicly disclosed and available for any citizen to review, and no conflicts of interest between voting machine companies and voting machine testing laboratories would be allowed.

The bill continues to build momentum, gaining 23 new co-sponsors in the last three months. It still needs more support, so if you live in Mr. King’s, Mr. Latham’s, or Mr. Nussle’s district, put the pressure on.

The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State has run a good many elections as Polk County auditor. He has developed one good habit that election protection activists want everyone to adopt: he audits his own ballot counting machines.

He has already begun work on his audit of the June 6 primary, he said Saturday at the Democrat’s state convention.

His practice is to wait until the official work is all done and the time for demanding recounts is past. During that time no one touches a thing. Only when it is clear that he can do no harm by running an in-house investigation. . . .only then does he say, “Let’s see how accurate our scanners were.” He selects a precinct at random and looks at the ballots the old fashioned way–with his eyes. He did not say if he makes any public announcement of his findings.

All counties do pre-election testing of their machines for accuracy. But Pottawattamie showed that such tests are often inadequate.

This sort of auditing is what auditors ought to do in every county. It is one of the goals of voting machine critics. It would be required by federal legislation that now has 191 co–sponsors.

Mauro already does it. Good for him. Is it done in any other county?

Pottawattamie county auditor Marilyn Jo Drake has been praised on a Wisconsin blog by software tester John Washburn.  Here’s some of what he had to say:

Congratulations to Marilyn Jo Drake

You may not have heard of Marilyn Jo Drake, yet. Marilyn Jo Drake is the County Auditor for Pottawatomie County, Iowa. In Wisconsin County Clerk would be the analogous title.

This last Tuesday (June 6, 2006), Marilyn Jo Drake decided an accurate election was more important than a convenient election. Marilyn Jo Drake had computer-generated numbers conveniently availble to her. Instead Ms. Drake report actual vote totals to the public in lieu of these computer-generated numbers which were masquerading as vote totals.

Making this right, but inconvenient descision has cost her much embarassment, time, and money.

She had to tell candidates and the press at 11:00 pm election night there would be no results that night. Candidates had to go to bed without knowing if they won or lost in the primary. Poor babies. . . . .

On her own authority she performed an audit of a precinct (the absentee ballots were effectively Precinct Zero) to determine if the voting machines were counting correctly.

She determined from this audit, the machine counts for Precinct Zero (the absentee ballots) were manifestly incorrect.

She then went public, immediately. . . .

She then executed an audit of the machine programing for the other 48 precincts of Pottawatomie County, Iowa.

As a result of the other 47 audits Marilyn Jo Drake now has vote totals for Potawatomie County, Iowa instead of convenient, computer-generated numbers masquerading as votes totals for Potawatomie County, Iowa.

Marilyn Jo Drake has a heroic character.

She accepted the uncomfortable truth over the pleasant, convenientand plausible lie. Her life would have been so much simplier today had she acceped the lie and stated Pottawatomie County, Iowa election were “problem free”. Instead, she chose accuracy over expediency.

I fear Marilyn Jo Drake may find she is one of only a hand full of election officials in the nation willing to choose this difficult option. But, I do know this, it may be a small club (3 so far), but being a member is worth it.

The original post is at washburnsworld.blogspot.com.

Thursday’s public test of the touchscreen terminals was similar to the the scanner test in that the same ten ballots were cast. As with the scanners, the computer was set for “Test Mode”.

I asked why they tested in “Test Mode” when the machine would not be used in test mode on election day. I might as well have asked why is the sky brighter in the daytime. Even the other citizen observer chimed in to help explain to me that this was only a test, so “Test Mode” was appropriate.

A bit later one tester volunteered to show me that a voter could not vote twice on the touchscreen because it would reject the voter’s card when he tried to use it the second time. She put the card back in the machine. It surprised her by accepting the card again and offering a new ballot. The other tester quickly realized that this unwanted development was made possible by the fact that they were in “Test Mode!”

I opined that it was now obvious that the machine behaves differently in its various modes and ought to be tested in “Election Mode”, but they just ignored my comment.

When the test was over, it was time to secure the memory card in the machine according to new SoS guidelines involving security tape. County auditor Bunda said that due to the Iowa wide run on security tape, it was on backorder. The voting machine would remain untaped for now.

Since I had to leave the test before the second set of touchscreens were put through their paces, I did not get to ask for my turn to participate in the test. I would have tried John Washburn’s advice by touching the corners and midpoints of the screen edges and would have tried touching the screen with unsteady hands.

Come to think of it, they were not testing any audio equipment. I could have blindfolded myself and tried to vote a test ballot. I wonder why that was not an option. The whole point of the Diebold TSX is that blind voters can vote unassisted by using the audio equipment.

Today they tested our new Diebold voting machines in Pocahontas. We have eleven precincts so eleven scanners and eleven touchscreens were arrayed in the Courthouse Assembly Room at 9:00 a.m. The auditor and four of her staff were present as were two observers.

Two staff members tested the scanner for one precinct while the other two tested the scanner for a different precinct. The auditor held the direction book and read off the directions for both teams. When they finished the scanners, they tested the touchscreens. In an hour they were done with those first two precincts. Assuming they pick up speed with practice, the work should have lasted much of the day. I stayed only until 10:45.

Ten ballots were entered for each test. All ten had been prepared by the local staff. Five of the ballots were exactly like each other. I was told this was required. (!) The next five were referred to as “randomly marked with overvotes and undervotes.” These five ballots allowed every candidate to get at least one vote, I think, and each write-in line was also voted once.

After the votes were cast a totals tape was run. They were not comparing the tape to the ballots they knew they had just cast until I asked about it. When the test was finished, the machine was reset for election day and a memory card was “locked” into the machine with a plastic security tag bearing a serial number.

As the testers moved on the next set of machines, I asked about submitting my own test ballots. Auditor Margene Bunda agreed that I was permitted to do so but she had to go back upstairs to her office to get some ballots. She brought 3 ballots (two Ds and one R) for the Dover precinct which was third in the testing sequence.

I marked the ballots so as to test the calibration of the equipment, following the advice of software tester John Washburn and remembering the Arizona calibration problems reported by professor Jones. One of the D ballots and the only R ballot were marked by me with a pencil. I scribbled all over the ballot except where the voter marks are supposed to go. Those ballots should record no votes when fed into the machine.

On the other D ballot I voted in a careless manner. I voted for Culver, erased it and voted for Fallon. I made a tiny pencil mark in the oval for Dusky Terry, but also made a good dark mark for Terry’s opponent Denise O’Brien. For one write in candidate I put a tiny arrow inside the oval but did not fill the oval in completely. For other candidates I made an X or a checkmark.

Then I left!! It was 10:45 and I was due in Laurens at 11:00. So I did not get to see the results of my three test ballots. Were my votes counted? The voter intent does not matter in Iowa. The mark must be readable by the machine.

Next: Testing the paperless touchscreens.

Iowa has not ordered the sequestering of its new Diebold touchscreen election equipment, according to John Hedgecoth, Deputy Secretary of State for Operations. So InsideBayArea.com was in error when it made that claim last week:

Pennsylvania, California and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital.

But the part about trusted software (it always comes back to “trust” for some people) does apply to Iowa. Hedgecoth told an independent online newspaper called The New Standard that

his office instructed elections officials in the state’s 99 counties to upload a final version of the software into their machines just before Election Day and then seal the machine with the memory card in it. “So we are controlling both the software in the field with a final version that is decided upon by our elections division, and then we’re securing the memory card against tampering on Election Day,” he said.

Not only is the sequestering report wrong about Iowa, these two reports (Rubin and Klein) must also be wrong about how difficult it is to know just whose software will actually control the action on election day. I don’t know the track record of Klein, but Avi Rubin’s track record is good. If he is wrong. even I will need someone new to trust.

Iowa’s election director Sandy Steinbach is chair of the voting systems board for the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). She has recently posted a directive to all states to guard their voting machine memory cards in a manner similar to the new Iowa and Florida regulations. See previous post here.

She warns all states to act promptly:

Failure to comply with this addendum negates the voting system’s status as a NASED-qualified voting system.

A response to this directive is expected from voting machine activists in a day or two. Steinbach is expected to be criticized for misrepresenting the facts and glossing over the problem in her memo. Go read it now so you will be ready for the coming argument. It is only a page and a half long. It is here.

Last year when the Iowa state senate passed SF 351 to require paper trails for voting, I was surprised that it passed unanimously. Someone explained that the Senators had seen their own electronic voting board break down in the middle of a vote and that had helped them see the need for the bill.

This spring the Iowa house followed suit and voted for paper trails. Again the vote was unanimous. Was it for the same reason?

In his last speech of the session, House speaker Chris Rants referred to the voting system when thanking the various House employees for their work:

Allysa makes sure I don’t miss all of your votes when your desk voting machines are broken – as they apparently often are.

They know the problems and they have the votes to fix them. But they can’t give up playing politics and actually pass the bill. So we, too, get to risk broken voting machines.

Secretary of State Chet Culver is about to issue an SOS (Save our Security) for Iowa’s voting machines. “Emergency” rules are to be published in early May—in time to plug security holes in the new equipment that will debut for the June primary election. Iowans for Voting Integrity obtained a copy of the rules last week.

The action is a tacit admission that Bev Harris and the other “conspiracy theorists” have been correct these last three years when they said computerized equipment offered new ways to steal elections.

The emergency rules govern the memory cards that carry the key programming and voting results. These cards are so small that any magician could hide several up his sleeve and swap them when no one is looking. An altered card could mean a stolen election. It already happened in a vivid demonstration in Florida last December, now known as the Hursti hack.

At first Iowa’s election director Sandy Steinbach shrugged off the Hursti caper, saying he had inside access to the equipment. Actually he had access similar to that of any poll worker, technician or courthouse employee. And since it is, after all, insiders who steal elections, Hursti revealed how it can be done in the future. He pulled the perfect crime, leaving not a trace of his activity.

So the new rules treat the memory devices as the virtual ballot boxes that they are. No one is to be left alone with a memory card. Serial numbers are to be invented in each county for each card, and seals are to be used to keep the same card in its proper place for the proper time. An inventory log of the card’s life history is to maintained, detailing its every move.

The rules follow this warning from California computer scientists who looked into the problem:

Harri Hursti’s attack does work: Mr. Hursti’s attack on the [Diebold]AV-OS is defnitely real. He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system, . . . .

The scientists pointed out that only paper ballots can truly prevent this attack from being the perfect storm of election fraud:

Successful attacks can only be detected by examining the paper ballots: There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred; the canvass procedure would not detect any anomalies, and would just produce incorrect results. The only way to detect and correct the problem would be by recount of the original paper ballots, . . . .

But not all voting machines involve paper ballots. Hmmm, haven’t we talked about this before?

Culver’s new rules follow similar rules from Florida but are not as complete. Florida warns local election officials to have backup plans in case a memory card turns up under the doormat or in case a security seal is found to be broken. And Florida reminds its election workers that all Diebold voting machines come with the SAME PASSWORD, and, really, it ought to be changed so that those of us who read about the “1111″ password will not be able to use it. Maybe these points have already been addressed in Iowa. Let’s hope so.

By Sean Flaherty

Last week, Carole Simmons and I were honored to represent Iowans for Voting Integrity at two important and inspiring election integrity events in Washington, D.C. April 6 and 7 were Lobby Days, a citizen lobbying effort on behalf of Rep. Rush Holt’s election reform bill HR 550, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act.

The Holt bill would require that all voting machines produce a voter-verified paper record, and that the paper record be the official ballot in a recount. Equally important, it would prohibit conflicts of interest between testing laboratories and voting machine vendors, require disclosure of software code, and establish a mandatory hand audit of 2% of all precincts in federal elections.

Congressman Jim Leach (R-IA-02) met with our Iowa-Missouri group, and agreed to cosponsor during our meeting! Three other Republicans, and six Democrats, have signed on since April 6.

Congressman Leach seemed a bit skeptical about two points: the cost of the bill, and the public disclosure of voting machine software. HR 550 provides funding for its provisions, to the tune of $150 million. The cost of the nationwide audit of 2% of precincts seemed to concern him. We mentioned the example of the Washington gubernatorial recount. That hand count cost about $3 million and counted 2.8 million ballots. In 2004 there were about 125 million votes cast, so the 2% puts the cost in the same league. The Washington example does provide evidence that the audit shouldn’t take us into tens of millions of dollars.

He wondered if public disclosure of software would make voting systems more vulnerable. I brought up the consensus against “security through obscurity.” Just as I thought we were getting into the weeds, he stated that he respected Holt, and was confident he had done his homework. He looked at Ms. Butler, said, “You know what, I like this. Sign me up as a cosponsor.”

Why hadn’t he signed on yet? Word had it among the leaders of Lobby Days that Leach is not one to cosponsor legislation. The issue may not be prominent on his radar screen, even though he was aware of a growing problem of public perception. He probably needed some constituent advocacy to nudge him in the right direction, and his respect for Rush Holt seemed quite unaffected.

It’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by the sobriety and passion of the election integrity movement. People came to lobby on their own dime, or on the pooled contributions of their state groups. They are well-informed , dismayed at what is happening to our democracy, and ready to fight for this cause as long as it takes. Not once did I hear a “conspiracy theory.” Those who try to dismiss our cause as belonging in the black-helicopter ranks should have been there.

There is real interest in this issue among Republicans. Some of the most spontaneous interest was shown by a staffer in a Republican Rep’s office (not one of the new cosponsors-yet). Politicians of both major parties have been through close races and dicey recounts. If you live in Jim Nussle’s (1st), Tom Latham’s, (4th) or Steve King’s (5th) district, or know folks who do, make sure that you mention the Republican cosponsors of HR 550 when you contact them. Frank Wolf (R-VA), according to Rush Holt, is a particularly weighty name among Congressional insiders.

Leonard Boswell (D-IA-03) is not yet a cosponsor; he should be! Here is a map of the 3rd District. If you live there, write him.

On Monday, a Florida activist (formerly of Clinton, IA) and I met with a staffer in Senator Harkin’s office. Harkin is interested in the issue but concerned about disabled access. The staffer, Beth Stein (actually a counsel to Harkin), assured us that he is committed to both a paper trail and equal access for the disabled. I think we can get him to come around. If we can arouse the interest of the Iowa disabled community, there’s no reason we can’t get him on board.

We did not lobby Senator Grassley, but the same principle applies to him as to all Republican legislators. It’s not a partisan issue, and the cosponsor list reflects that fact.

We’ve got a lot of work to do for election integrity here in Iowa. HR 550 is gaining momentum, but there is no guarantee that it or any other federal election integrity legislation will pass soon. We need to push for a state election integrity law with many of the same provisions as the Holt bill. But with our first HR 550 cosponsor, we are off to a strong start.

Iowa is using computerized voting machines that do not comply with the Iowa Code, according to one of the few Iowans who actually understands how the machines work. University of Iowa Professor of Computer Science Doug Jones says the voting machines violate code provision 52.7.

That law calls for the machine to “store each ballot cast separate from the ballot tabulation function, which ballot may be reproduced on paper in the case of a recount, manual audit, or machine malfunction.” In remarks prepared for state legislators March 8, Jones said no machine currently in use meets this requirement. Jones warned that Iowa voting machines therefore could be open to a court challenge.

The problem is that the nasty little computers do not store the ballot information in more than one way. They can tally the votes and they can also reproduce on paper the votes as they are recorded by the machine, but these are not separate records. Both originate from the same recording of the vote. Or as my Dad used to say, “It’s the same difference.”

So don’t be reassured when the local advocate of magic voting machines tells you that all is well—that we can print out the votes one by one and thus verify the total. The printout is merely a reincarnation of the total, not evidence for the total’s accuracy. That is what the computer scientist said.

This law could be accommodated by requiring the machine to print out a paper record of the vote at the time the voter is still present and allowing the voter to inspect it. Then the ballot is indeed stored separately from the tabulation function.

This provision may make it possible for the Secretary of State or his board of examiners of voting machines to require paper trails without getting legislative approval for a bill such as SF 351. If the Secretary orders voter verified paper trails, he is merely following existing code. If he doesn’t order them, how is he complying with the code?

Today at 4:20 pm the Iowa Board of Examiners of Voting Machines will meet in Des Moines at the Lucas State Office Building to consider this agenda:

Discussion and action regarding level of examination needed for upgrade to Diebold AccuVote-TSX DRE Touch Screen

I do not know the significance of this meeting, what is being upgraded or when it would occur. These touchscreen voting machines will be used in most Iowa counties in less than 90 days at the June 6 primary.

We won’t get good voting machines until we get tougher on who gets to use them. That means no paper proof for votes cast on touchscreen machines will be mandated in Iowa. Not unless we also crack down on people who vote twice and on the wave of non-citizen voting.

That was the message from Des Moines Representative Libby Jacobs, except that she did not refer to non-citizen voting as a “wave.” She delivered her message to members of Iowans for Voting Integrity (IVI) who sat down with her for a brief conference. IVI is a Jefferson county-born group of concerned citizens. Jacobs chairs the subcommittee of the Iowa House that must act on the paper trail bill.

Jacobs argued that there is no point in securing the election equipment against failure by adding paper ballots because the election itself would still not be secure against rogue voters. So we need to add a requirement that voters show a government issued photo identification card before they vote. She said even her children have to show such cards to participate in athletic events. (That’s never happened to my children, by the way). She said she was willing to put up with voting machines of ill repute until she gets the tougher requirements for identifying illegal voters!

So, Iowans, is this a problem? Are our elections being polluted by extraterrestrial voters who resemble us? Are some of your neighbors driving to all the nearby polls and voting in place of citizens who died just before election day? Does this happen in the primary elections and in school board elections or only in November general elections?

We need to know. Only if we get this cleared up will we be able to require believable voting equipment that puts votes down on paper. You can start compiling the evidence here in the comments section.
If we find evidence, we can convince the League of Women Voters to agree to Jacobs’s plan. If there is no evidence, we can convince Jacobs her plan is superfluous.

Do you know of any college kids who vote absentee at home and also at their Colorado campus? Maybe it’s the other way around: they vote in Ames and also send absentee ballots back to Alabama where their parents live.

Maybe you know people in Clive who own houses at Okoboji and think they should be able to vote both places because they pay property tax both places. Well, you can forget about those cases of fraud because (1) a tough ID rule won’t help catch the college kids, and (2) the clueless in Clive are now foiled by the statewide voter registration database. They can no longer be registered in both places.

We really are down to the impersonators of infrequent voters or of recently deceased voters. Any reason to believe this is happening near you? Or anywhere in the state? Any evidence?

What’s wrong with same day voter registration? Sen Kibbie (D-Emmetsburg) asked. Why do we even need voter registration? We didn’t used to have it. What changed?

Answering his own question, Kibbie blamed the change on mischief elsewhere. “Chicago changed,” he said, apparently referring to corrupt voting practices by the Daley political machine years ago which prompted Iowa to begin registering voters.

Kibbie is right. The highest voter turnout is in states that allow same day registration. Two of them border Iowa (Wisconsin and Minnesota). Kibbie said barriers to voting should be removed. He obviously thought early registration was an unnecessary barrier for Iowa voters.

This is especially true now that provisional ballots are part of the process. If there is doubt about the status of registered voters, they may be required to fill out a provisional ballot. This same safeguard could be used in place of conventional registration.

Think how much money this would save. Auditors spend many hours keeping track of party changes, address changes, name changes, and registering new voters. But when you get to the polls, does anyone ask to see your registration card?

Senator Kibbie is co-president of the Iowa Senate. He made his comments Friday in Pocahontas, Iowa.