Iowa Voters

from Common Cause Iowa here’s just what you need for Thursday night—

Resolution to support passage of the Fair Elections Now Act (US Senate File 1285) and Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (Iowa House File 805 & Senate File 553)

WHEREAS, our political system at all levels is increasingly dominated by the influence of large sums of private money that finance electoral campaigns, diminishing the right of all Iowans to equal and meaningful participation in the democratic process, and

WHEREAS, a number of states – including Arizona, Maine and Connecticut – have adopted systems of clean elections which provide full public financing for primary and general campaigns to candidates who opt to run “clean campaigns,” and
WHEREAS, such voluntary voter owned election laws have helped to restore democracy and public confidence in the election and governing processes of those states; and

WHEREAS, the State Government Committee of the Iowa House and Senate, have approved HF805 and SF 553 – the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) on a bi-partisan basis, and US Senate File 1285, the Fair Elections Now Act, has been proposed in the US Senate;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the (Iowa Democratic Party or Republican Party of Iowa) supports the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) and Fair Elections Now Act, to establish an election system in which candidates could choose to forego fundraising from private sources, accept spending limits and receive a set amount of money from a publicly financed election fund.

Tuesday is municipal election day in Iowa. The Iowa code appears to require that small towns use paper ballots (not touchscreens) if turnout is expected to be light. Look here:

49.26 COMMISSIONER TO DECIDE METHOD OF VOTING –
COUNTING OF BALLOTS.
1. In all elections regulated by this chapter, the voting shall be by ballots printed and distributed as provided by law, or by voting machines meeting the requirements of chapter 52.
2. When voting machines are available for an election precinct, the commissioner shall determine in advance of each election conducted for a city of three thousand five hundred or less population or any school district in which voting occurs in that precinct whether voting there shall be by machine or paper ballot.
If the commissioner concludes, on the basis of voter turnout for recent similar elections and factors considered likely to affect voter turnout for the forthcoming election, that voting will probably be so light as to make preparation and use of paper ballots less expensive than preparation and use of a voting machine, paper ballots shall be used.

The quoted passage refers also to school board elections. As I reported in September, Pocahontas county used touchscreens for an uncontested election. By my reading of the code, that should not have happened.

In July I asked my auditor about the use of ordinary paper ballots versus the cost of preparing the touchscreens for minor elections. No answer so far, but its only been 100 days.

This morning National Public Radio broadcast a report praising Iowa’s system for drawing legislative and Congressional district boundaries. We’re the only state in the nation that lets the voters pick the Congressman instead of letting the Congressmen pick their voters (throught their control of redistricting). Jim Leach and Mike Gronstal were interviewed.

The non-partisan system dates back to a ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court and an subsequent law signed by Robert Ray in 1972.

We’re also envied for our system of selecting judges and voting periodically on whether to retain them in office. And for our first in the nation Presidential caucuses. Now if we could add a clean elections VOICE, we could really be heard!

Here’s a surprise package I found under my election reform tree on Christmas eve: Approval Voting.

I’ve lately been interested in instant runoff voting as a way of broadening the field of candidates. This idea of approval voting sounds better:

Approval voting allows voters to vote for as many candidates as they find acceptable. For instance, one can approve of a minor-party favorite and at the same time vote for an acceptable major-party candidate. There is no ranking; the candidate with the most approval votes wins, ensuring that the winning candidate is acceptable to the largest fraction of the electorate.

. . . it should induce more citizens to go to the polls, . . . It allows minor-party candidates to receive their proper due, . . .[It] should also reduce negative campaigning, . . .[It] can be implemented on existing voting machines and is relatively easy for voters to understand.

What’s not to like? It’s even used already by some private associations. It’s how we get a new Secretary General at the UN, too.

Put this on your back burner and move to the post below for a front burner item–a petition for you to sign.

Merry Christmas.

Since Iowans are my audience, I’ll repost this from another blog. It’s really pertinent for Iowans who are interested in third parties or merely in seeing all views treated fairly:

In the opinion of Ballot Access News, the only realistic hope to expand presidential general election debates in 2008, is for people to pester the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for president, and get them to say that if they are nominated, they will agree to participate in at least one debate in the general election campaign that includes the leading minor party and independent candidates.

The only general election presidential debate in U.S. history that included the Republican nominee, the Democratic nominee, and anyone else, was in 1992. Ross Perot was included because both major party nominees wanted him included. The opinion of the debate sponsor, the Commission on Presidential Debates, didn’t really matter.

Democrats and Republicans who want to be president will be spending lots of time in New Hampshire and Iowa, during the next year. If, every time they speak to a group of voters, someone asks them to agree to at least one inclusive general election debate, perhaps eventually some of them will make this commitment. A Republican or Democrat who makes such a commitment would gain certain degree of popularity, since polls consistently show that the public likes debates with more than just two participants.

A commenter at Ballot Access News who claimed to be from New Hampshire already promised to bring this up when he sees candidates in his state. Who will do it in Iowa?

Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen has adopted the views of Iowans for Voting Integrity, saying today in his column that the newly elected Democrats “need to follow their party platform and mandate a ‘voter-verified paper audit trail’ for Iowa ballots.”

And to get a really good system, Yepsen’s ready to buy out all the touchscreens in the counties that use touchscreens exclusively:

Getting all Iowans to vote the same way would mean 19 counties will have to scrap their new high-tech machines. Perhaps the state can help defray the cost of replacement scanners.

It would be worth the expense to restore public confidence in our elections, especially in a state like Iowa, where so many important elections are decided by narrow margins.

Yepsen cites the 18,000 missing votes in a Florida congressional race in his case against paperless voting.

I don’t know how to bump a previous post to the top of the page so I’ll just link to it,and remind you to vote on paper no matter where you live.

If you are still holding an absentee ballot, you can take it to the courthouse by 9 pm Tuesday, or you can call your political party and have them send a courier to get it. You can also surrender it at your local polling place and vote on a fresh ballot at the polls. Do not mail absentee ballots on election day.

Polls open at 7 am and close at 9 pm. Call your auditor to confirm your polling place or your registration.

Identification is not required at the polls but a pollworker is permitted to ask for some if the worker does not know you. Many things will satisfy the pollworker: a paycheck, a utility bill, a government ID card.

After the polls close, go back to see if they posted the results in the window.

Thanks for voting. “If you don’t turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.”

Deleted. Off topic and now obsolete.

UPDATE on 10/10/06: Press account of the event is here.
************************************
The Ottumwa League of Women Voters and Indian Hills Community College are co sponsoring a program on “The Trials and Tribulations of Electronic Voting” on Monday evening October 9th at 7PM in the Advance Tech Building Room #134 on the IHCC campus.

The speaker will be Douglas W. Jones PhD., Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa .

Dr. Jones has testified regarding voting system technology in several states since 2000 as well as the Federal Election Commission. His statements on problems with voting technology have been quoted by the New York Times, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, and Scientific American . He has been a guest of NPR Science Friday.

He participated in the 2006 revision of New York ’s voting system standards. He served on the Election Observation Mission for the 2005 presidential election in Kazakhstan .

The public is invited to attend this lecture and participate in the dialog following Dr. Jones presentation.

—LWV press release

The Iowa City Press Citizen has a profile of professor Doug Jones, nationally known voting machine expert who helped win a court case in Colorado in late August.

An excerpt:

“We have to design technology that’s extraordinarily easy to use. Our current voting regulations don’t look at how complicated it is,” he said.

Aside from technology, Jones said the American election system is the most complicated in the world.

Thanks to reporter Hieu Pham in Iowa City.

Iowa’s voting machine expert and computers scientist Doug Jones testified this week in Colorado on the vulnerability of electronic voting machines.

Jones is a genuine expert witness. Like the old joke says, experts get more respect as they get farther away from home. Jones has been to Florida, Arizona, Panama, and Kazakhstan to examine elections. Meanwhile one supposed “expert” in the Marshall county auditor’s office told me last year, “I know about Professor Jones, but I just don’t agree with him.”

Email voting has one advantage (speed) but two disadvantages (loss of balllot secrecy and loss of security). How about a compromise method that retains some secrecy and gains some speed? Granted this idea is slower than the Iowa plan, but it is as secure as regular absentee ballots.

This idea is constructed from a conversation between Prof Doug Jones and Iowans for Voting Integrity president Carole Simmons and others. I was not present for the conversation.

The Plan:

Overseas voters can apply for absentee ballots by email and counties can send out ballots as pdf files. That speeds up the process.

Voters must then print the ballot pdf, mark it as any other paper ballot, and mail it back via the post office. That retains all the security of absentee ballots and is more secretive than email.

There is unlikely to be complete privacy here, however. This ballot can’t go through the scanner, so it has to be counted by real people. They might know the voter in question if only one or two pdf ballots arrive at a precinct.

But we have gained transmission security and some privacy, while giving up some speed.

Here is a thorough critique of a 2004 email voting plan. Hat tip to Prof Jones.

Don’t forget that the school board election is Tuesday, September 12. I’ll be voting in the uncontested race in Laurens mainly to see if anything is different from the primary election. Will they still use those high priced touchscreens and scanners for an election with no contests? Hand counted paper ballots would be cheaper and faster.

Mother Jones magazine has an article called “Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America’s worst places to cast a ballot (or try)”. In the part called “Machine Meltdowns” they printed this error:

In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, machines suddenly began counting some candidates’ votes backward.

Now it is true that some voting machines are capable of counting backwards if the totals get high enough (over 32,000 votes, I think). But that is not what happened in our June primary in Pottawattamie County.

What really happened is that the machines didn’t know about ballot rotation. Rotation keeps the same candidate from being at the top of the list in every precinct. The machines were set up to read the top line and report the total for candidate A in every precinct even though candidate A was not actually in the top slot in all precincts.

This produced some eye-opening results and the machines were turned off before bedtime. Paper ballots were counted correctly the next day.

It’s a simple story. How could Mother Jones get it so wrong? Well, at least there is a paper trail, and they can correct their error.

Here’s James Bovard’s attack on the “We can’t be bothered with this” attitude expressed by so many Republicans in the Congress when the 2004 election was challenged over Ohio’s returns.

The best lines:

The “debate” in Congress illustrated how elections are now about consecration, rather than representation. Elections have become something for rulers to shroud themselves in, rather than leashes used by the people. Politicians are obsessed with maintaining the imagined dignity of their class, not in resolving doubts about honest vote counting.