Iowa Voters

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.

Despite the ever-flowing river of condemnation for DRE voting machines(see the California report just six weeks ago), Pocahontas county uses them at every opportunity, forsaking their paper ballot equipment. Today in an uncontested school board race, we had to vote on the touchscreen.

Since the outcome was virtually certain anyway, I used the occassion to write in a candidate instead of voting for the unchallenged incumbent. I wrote in “Paper Ballot.”

Doing so caused me to realize something. The election workers could tell I was writing in a candidate! Every time I touched a letter on the screen as I typed out P-a-p-e-r B-a-l-l-o-t the Diebold made a beeping noise. The election judge was only six feet away. No other voters were in the room, so it was quiet as could be. She had been listening to voters all day. She knows it doesn’t take that many beeps to vote on two races.

Meanwhile the old red, white and blue voting booths for paper ballot use stood unoccupied like ghosts from the past on the north wall of the room. They are always there, always ready. They don’t beep, either. One can actually vote secretly in one of them.

You’ve never seen a more patriotic video than this one.

It documents how the people of Wilton, NH count their 2200 paper ballots by hand. And it explains why some of the counters are sitting on some of the ballots while they work: it’s a low tech (how much lower could you get?) solution to the common computer problem of having more votes tallied than there were ballots cast.

Here’s another, wherein the volunteers of Lyndeborough, NH count 1100 ballots at no cost to the city. They actually turned away volunteers in 2004.

Update: Here’s the whole show.

Correction: Calhoun has been dropped from the list of Ivotronic counties.

Dan Rather is out tonight with an expose of ES & S touchscreen voting machines. He says they were made in a sweatshop in the Phillippines where quality control consisted of grabbing the gadget with both hands and giving it a shake. This was supposed to expose any loose parts.

Here’s a twelve minute excerpt.

The following Iowa counties have the Ivotronic: Emmet, Calhoun, Jasper, Fayette, Clayton, Clinton, Johnson, and Lee.

Two bizarre “audits” of today’s straw poll in Ames were announced –one to cast doubt on the process and one to soothe fears of skeptical voters. Neither audit could accomplish much of anything.

The official Republican “audit” was being conducted by the state auditor David Vaudt. I inquired as to how it would work. My question was answered by a county auditor who had volunteered to help out and was supervising the 6 Diebold scanners in Hilton Coliseum. He said that at some point one of the six scanners would be opened and its stack of ballots would be counted to determine that the number of ballots matched the machine’s count of ballots that had been deposited.

No ballots would actually be examined. The audit would not show that the machine had properly read the pencil mark on the ballot or that it had properly totalled the ballots marked for each candidate. It would only show that the machine contained the number of ballots that its indicator screen claimed.

Such an audit is of no help in reassuring that the count for each candidate is accurate. We want to know that the machine did NOT take every tenth Tancredo vote and move it to Mitt. Such mischief could terminate Tom Tancredo.

Mitt moved mountains to win the poll. Ron Paul supporters need to know Mitt was not able to move votes inside the black boxes. They are a skeptical bunch.

Worse than the Republican audit was the one going on outside the polling place by people in yellow shirts saying VoteinSunshine. They were conducting a non-random exit poll. They gave voters a yellow half page paper to sign. The paper said the signer was signing because he wanted the votes to be properly counted. Signers were also supposed to scribble down the name of the candidate for whom they had just voted back at the Diebold scanner. The papers were then deposited in a translucent plastic box.

According to a Wisconsin woman working on this project, these exit poll results would be counted and reported at the same time (7 pm) as the official results.

Unfortunately many voters walked past the exit poll without participating. The woman claimed Romney voters put “their noses in the air.”

So what good is this? Vote in Sunshine will have different results from the official results because some groups will be undersampled by their casual methods. For all their efforts to advocate hand counting and to insist that ballots actually be examined by citizens, their totals will be worthless and that will undermine their work.

Really good audits are not hard to do. Some fraction of the scanners would have their ballots recounted by hand. Landslide results require very small audits. Close elections require more extensive hand counting. Statisticians know how to determine the minimum size audit for any circumstances. It’s time we started this practice.