Iowa Voters

New York still uses mechanical lever voting machines such as Iowa once used. They are the only state still doing so. Attorney Andrea Novick and NY writer Ruth Wahtera each have blogs that make the case for levers over scanners. Novick has researched NY case law and believes that spot checks of ballots (known loosely as “audits”) after election night violate NY constitutional law. I’ve linked these blogs on the blogroll on the right side of this page, and here they are:
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition

Save NY’s Lever Voting Machines

After reading some of Novick’s work I came to understand the Iowa law that seals up our ballots on election night and prohibits anyone from examining them until the day they are burned. New York has such a law. It is intended to prevent fraudulant recounts. New York assumed that once the ballots leave the polling place their custody is no longer secure and they can be altered or more can be stuffed into the box or some could fall out of the box, etc. So NO RECOUNTS are allowed in New York.

Of course this law assumed that the election night count was not made by concealed software which hardly anyone present could understand or verify. Perhaps Iowa law had assumed the same thing. Nowadays we have electronic vote counting by anonymous programmers. The election night count cannot be accepted at face value.

I’m getting nostalgic for lever machines. Plus I hear they last for 100 years.

It’s just like the federal Election Assistance Commission (created by HAVA) to keep quiet about the bad news, so don’t be surprised at this story. They were warned last month about the dangers of computerized vote counts, but they kept the warning out of the press until McClatchy broke the story this week.

The warning came from the CIA. An agent said some provocative things such as

“I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen.”

He also alleged that two highly publicized 2004 elections had seen electronic tampering–Venezuela and Ukraine. Lots of Americans think Ohio should be added to that list of fishy 2004 elections.

Secret Agent guy says opportunities abound when computers are used at the polls:

Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

Internet voting was also panned by Stigall. We have all the bad stuff right here in the USA: internet balloting, computerized counting (in Iowa yet!), paperless voting machines, wireless connections, and motivated politicians, I’m sure. I wouldn’t even trust the CIA.

The University of Iowa’s professor Doug Jones, a world leader in voting machine oversight, has today described the Diebold voting machine audit logs as “just totally nuts.” Diebold machines count most of the votes in Iowa elections. The audit logs are supposed to reveal what the machine has been doing as it proceeds through the stages of ballot reading and counting.

Audit logs came under scrutiny in Humboldt County, California when a public auditing process discovered that votes had not been counted in the official results. Those official totals had come from Diebold (now hiding behind the name Premier) vote counting software. Wired.com interviewed Jones, who said

“These audit logs could give us some assurances [about an election] if they were genuinely designed so that a casual bystander could look at them and understand them,” says Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and former chairman of a board that examines and approves voting machines for use in Iowa. “[But] having them cryptic and obscure destroys the value in terms of election transparency.”

So it seems that Diebold logs don’t tell everything that happened in the correct order, as we all thought a log was supposed to do. Wired’s “Threat Level” reporter Kim Zetter goes on–

The audit logs appear to record only limited types of events on the system and provide no comprehensive record that tracks every event performed by an election official.

Premier didn’t respond to a query from Threat Level about the logs. But Jones said the Premier/Diebold system, as far as he knows, provides no single log file that chronologically lists all events in the life of an election.

Instead, he says, the system keeps “lots and lots of different logs” that appear to have been “independently designed by people who didn’t talk to each other” and that are incomprehensible to anyone except the vendor. He assumes Premier has documentation explaining how to interpret the logs, but says if it does, the company doesn’t share that information with election officials, making independent audits of a voting system difficult if not impossible.

So . . .lots of logs . . .don’t talk to each other . . .need documentation to interpret the logs . . .but WAIT—

“From the point of view of actually doing any forensics, it’s a mess,” Jones said. “Because you have to understand what all of the logs are saying, and all of the documentation to understand what they’re saying are not public documents. I find that truly reprehensible. The idea that you can have this inscrutable document, but that you can’t have any document to understand that document, is just totally nuts.”

I know that Iowa auditors are conferring with the Secretary of State about a weak audit bill for the current legislature to consider. “It will be better than nothing,” I was told. Given the “threat level,” I think that is a pretty low standard for a state that wants to be First in the Nation again in 2012. Having fallen for Diebold’s disasterous devices despite Jones’s best efforts to protect Iowa, we need a strong audit bill. States from Maine to California (literally) are pushing past us.

cross posted at BleedingHeartland. You can comment there, too.

(Update Below)

This fall the registrar of Humboldt county, California allowed local citizens to post all the ballots on the internet after the election. This was an audacious and innovative project. And guess what? This audit uncovered two counting errors, one of which traces directly to the secret software Diebold used to count the paper ballots and has made national news among election officials.

Meanwhile the local newspaper has praised the publication of the ballots in today’s editorial, noting that

To make this perfectly clear, if the transparency project were not around, the vote of Humboldt County’s voters would have been inaccurately tabulated.

This was not a recount in the wake of a close election. No one suspected these errors. The “logic and accuracy tests” upon which all county officials hang their hats had not prevented these errors. As the editorialists observe:

What better way to make sure vote counts are accurate than to make it possible for anyone and everyone across the state to conduct their own recounts, whenever and however they choose? It smells like democracy.

Iowa ballots get hidden away after the election. No one is supposed to look at them while they wait to be destroyed months later. We are light years behind this California county.

UPDATE:
Here’s the site where you can see the ballots:
http://hum.dreamhosters.com/etp/

Further details (h/t Mitch)
http://www.humtp.com
http://democracycounts.blogspot.com
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/Nov2008
http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/ourvotes.html
http://www.tevsystems.com/press.html (for more links)

Voting machines in Black Hawk County have apparently counted ballots that don’t exist. This was discovered Wednesday during a recount in the close race between Representative Jeff Danielson and challenger Walt Rogers. Seven ballots are missing. According to the WCFCourier the recount shaved votes from both candidates.

The county conducted an honest-to-goodness hand recount of paper ballots. The recount occurred because precinct pollworkers had suspected a miscount on election night. County Auditor Grant Veeder organized an investigation, laying ballots in piles and counting them twice.

Veeder says “We are still doing some checking” in an effort to explain this anomaly.

Iowa took a giant step forward in this election by doing without touchscreen voting machines. We still need to take the next step. We need post election audits during which actual cast ballots are counted by hand and compared to the machine that already counted them. In the Black Hawk case the machine looks to have failed.

Hal, the 2001, A Space Odyssey computer with a mind of its own, is apparently lurking in some ES & S voting machines in Arkansas. They took votes from one race, assigned them to a candidate in another race and produced the wrong winner.

Worse than that: they reassigned the votes to a race that had been omitted from the ballot!

Here’s the deal. The touchscreens were programmed erroneously such that one race had been omitted. It would not appear on the screen, so voters could not vote in that race. The county noted the error and compensated by using regular old paper ballots for the one missing race.

When the election was over the touchscreens reported their votes. They claimed to have votes for the race that never appeared on the screen. Enough extra votes to make the loser into the winner. Thanks, Hal!

Luckily these errant computers produced a paper trail. Close comparison of the paper to the touchscreen totals showed no votes for the missing race on the paper trail since no one had been able to vote in that race. However, the total in a different race was low compared to the number of plainly visible paper trail votes. The two discrepancies were–voila–the same amount! When the votes were reassigned back where they belonged, the correct winner was restored to both races.

Aren’t you glad Iowa is getting rid of its touchscreens?

Those candidates looking for a recount in Iowa’s primary had better be on their toes when they go looking for possible errors in the count. There are many ways to get the wrong totals.

The 2004 campaign to purge voters from the roles in Florida has moved to Missouri. It has already been successful in Arizona and Indiana. See this tale with photo from Digby.

Several times over the next few weeks HBO will show the 2006 movie “Hacking Democracy,” an investigation of voting machines. A little progress has been made to protect democracy from these machines, but the movie’s central questions remain unaddressed: How did Florida’s Volusia County report negative votes for Al Gore in 2000? And how can we defend against miscounted paper ballots when computers do the counting in secret?

We Iowans are patting ourselves on the back, having just dumped our touchscreens. But the legislature failed to take the next step–auditing the paper ballots after the computerized scanners do the initial count. The movie makes clear why this is needed.

This is a vivid and eye-opening film. Although I had read about many of the episodes documented in it, I had not seen it until today. I don’t have HBO, I never bought the DVD and never took the time to watch the nine part YouTube edition which starts here. Luckily for me a friend in Pocahontas taped the HBO showing yesterday and drove it over to my house.

I know some of what has happened since the film was first issued. It hints that the 2004 recount in Ohio was rigged, and indeed two people later got jail terms for their part in rigging it. It recounts several investigations by computer scientists into voting machine computer code, but there have been more investigations since. All of them always produce bad news for the voting machine advocates.

The film shows how some Florida scanners were hacked. The county involved got rid of those machines, but they (Diebold scanners) still dominate in Iowa.

We know what to do. We must count ballots by hand after the computer counts. If the race is close, we must count quite a few of the ballots. If it’s a landslide, we can audit a much smaller number of ballots. But we can’t take the computer’s word for it–ever.

Ask your local election workers at the June primary if they have seen the movie. Ask your favorite candidates if they have seen it. Ask your auditor why no audits are planned. Ask Secretary Mauro, too.

UPDATE: The video below was just getting a good start circulating the internet when the real news told us a major US military contractor has made an unsolicited bid to buy Diebold. United Technologies, makers of Pratt & Whitney jet engines and Sikorsy helicopters now wants to make voting machines, too. Diebold has rejected the offer. Stay tuned and remember Ike’s warning about the military-industrial complex garnering “unwarranted influence” over democracy.
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While we wait for our shadowy overlords to write laws to protect us from voting machines, we can imagine what might happen if they don’t get it done:

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.

Tonight MoveOn.org is not practicing what it preaches. The lobby group has advocated paper trails for voting machines, but it is now conducting an apparently unverifiable poll via the internet, deciding which Democrat should be endorsed for the White House.

Actions speak louder than words. Shame on MoveOn. How will the supporters of the losing candidate know this vote was fairly conducted? Why did that link appear to work both times when people tried to vote twice? My two votes occurred hours apart, but MoveOn sent me thank you confirmations each time!

Media-savvy Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity took advantage of the slow pace of holiday news to get some airtime on Iowa Public Radio. He warned Iowans about those ES & S touchscreen voting gadgets that caused trouble in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Several Iowa counties use the same touchscreens, notably Sean’s own Johnson County, as well as Keokuk, Newton, Clinton, Estherville. (complete list here. Look for “iVotronic” in the right hand column.)

It seems the election workers in one South Carolina county failed to get through all 999 steps when they prepared the touchscreens for the primary voting. As a result, most of the county’s gadgets would not work when the polls opened. Voters had to wait or give up and go away.

Irony abounds. Sean and others had written all the Presidential campaigns earlier to warn them about Carolina’s wondrous paperless touchscreens. He feared a contentious result (similar to what already happened in New Hampshire) could not be resolved without a paper record of the vote. He neglected to point out to the candidates that the damn gadgets might prevent voting altogether–at least until the tech support crew arrived at the various polls with their fire hoses.

Though John McCain considered seeking a court order to keep the affected polls open past the regular closing time, most news coverage and most candidates pretended nothing happened. Just another messy election.

Is there any Hope? Yes, pencils don’t need much preparation. Audits can catch mistakes. Sean comforted his listeners by saying our home state was looking into it. The Experienced Mauro is on the case. We had our close call already. Time to fix the system. Hope and Experience together can do it.

Happy MLK birthday.

Sean Flaherty, co-chair of Iowans for Voting Integrity, led off the primary election season with a fifteen minute interview on Iowa Public Radio’s Midday show on Tuesday.

He cited the many studies of voting machines that have found so many flaws, and emphasized that the main critics are computer scientists.

Flaherty concludes by arguing that final voting figures must be verifiable without relying on sofware. That means any electronically counted ballots must be audited. Audit laws are gaining ground in many states, notably in New Jersey.

Who would have ever thought that we might look to New Jersey for ways to improve Iowa’s election administration?

The interview begins two minutes and thirty seconds into the podcast.

Here’s another good video, apparently just posted at YouTube in the wake of the NH Clinton upset. It attacks the chain of custody for NH’s Diebold scanners and, best of all, shows the famous Harry Hursti hack from three years ago. Some 36,000 people have viewed it already this week, so don’t be left out!

I am not meaning to cast doubt on the Clinton win, but I am taking advantage of the news to remind Iowa that audits of the counted ballots are needed in every election. New Jersey just passed the nation’s best audit law, but Iowa does nothing at all. Let’s not get left out in the cold with unexamined ballots.

Thanks to Cindy for pointing me to this video. That’s Hursti in the video sitting in front of Silvestro, I think.

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.