A new bill approved by committee today in the Iowa Senate moves us much closer to paper ballots. Senate Study bill 3262 mandates paper ballots for the fall election and the state picks up the tab!
This goes a step beyond previous plans passed last spring to phase out touchscreens as they wear out. That bill also required paperless touchscreen terminals to have printers added to them. Arguments over the cost and who would pay for the printers, as well as over the poor performance they have showed in other states, prompted Governor Culver to flirt with a vote by mail system instead of buying more equipment to replace our 2005 purchases.
When the all mail ballot idea was panned by the state’s auditors this winter, Culver agreed to fund ballot marking devices for all counties that preferred them to touchscreen printers. Today’s legislation amends last year’s Iowa law by phasing out the touchscreens after September’s school board races.
No doubt the recent revenue estimate for the state has made this move much easier–state tax collections are exceeding expectations
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:
State Representative Mary Gaskill wants to check on those computerized ballot scanners by counting 5% of the ballots by hand. She has filed a bill creating a state election audit board to oversee the process. The board would also have broad authority to review election administration in five randomly chosen counties after each general election.
Gaskill’s bill, HF 2206 is simple. Each county must hand count ballots in enough precincts to reach the 5% goal. If the count shows the machine was off by more than 1/2 % the audit would be expanded. If an actual recount of the entire race is invoked by a candidate, the audit would be unnecessary.
Not every race on the ballot will get reviewed during the audit. The bill says
The postelection audit shall be conducted for elections for the offices of president of the United States or governor, United States senator, United States representative, and at least a total of two additional partisan offices or public measures on the ballot, which shall be chosen by lot at the same time, and in the same manner, the precincts are chosen.
Such an automatic audit could have saved New Hampshire from the recount of its Democratic presidential primary last month. For now the Gaskill bill does not cover primaries, but can go into effect for November 2008 if the legislature approves. Let’s hope they do.
From Jennifer Jacobs for the Des Moines Register today:
Gov. Chet Culver is backing down on his plan for updating Iowa’s election technology after weeks of disagreement over how to ensure a paper trail for every voting machine.
Culver said Friday he is now willing to use state money to help counties switch to one uniform system with paper ballots.
And at long last, Culver criticizes touchscreens:
Touch-screen machines are “not the best options, and I’d like to try to avoid it if we can,” Culver said.
Thank you, Governor Culver. And Secretary Mauro.
Now the ball is in the county courthouses. Will those who fell for touchscreens realize that not every county made that mistake and therefore the counties bear some financial responsibiltiy?
Once those touch$creen toy$ are gone from the polling places, we will face the fact that all this money has been spent for “acce$$ible” voting equipment that sits unused. All to satisfy a federal mandate that was pushed through by voting machine companies who are the principal winners in this story. Beware the lobbyist with something to sell!
What a sad state of finger-pointing we have come to regarding Iowa’s tarnished election administration. In the Sunday Des Moines Register Governor Culver blames counties for the paperless voting machines he let them buy when he was Secretary of State. Story county auditor Mosiman defends her purchase, saying she acted on information available at the time.
They both need better alibis than that.
There was plenty of information available at the time (here, too, and here). If auditors and then Secretary Culver had paid more attention to computer experts like our own Doug Jones in Iowa City, we could have avoided this mess. Instead Mosiman went to Des Moines to testify against a paper trail bill. Auditors listened to savvy salesmen who managed to make those paperless touchscreens work long enough to close the deal. And besides, it was only tax money, much of it coming from the feds.
Culver’s correct that counties made the actual purchase decisions. He’s right that he (belatedly) urged them to have some sort of paper trail. But he was timid as a pussycat, never speaking against touchscreens. Worse than that, he even asked Professor Jones to resign from the Board of Examiners of Voting Machines during the crucial decision making period. Jones had single-handedly protected Iowa from Diebold during the many years he was on the board.
Culver should not prevent the legislature from mopping up. He should tell our Congressional delegation to back the Holt bill that would bail us out of our troubles (with yet more federal money).
Mosiman and the other county auditors who fell for touchscreens should admit that they were not paying adequate attention to the critics who sought to warn them before they spent the money HAVA provided.
Kiss and make up, you two. The legislature is trying to help.
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!
A new federal bill could resolve the tension between two of Iowa’s top Democrats–the Governor and the Secretary of State. Today’s Register reports that Mauro wants to get all our votes on paper ballots, but Culver is content to buy “paper trails” for the tempermental touchscreens that now infect the state’s polling places.
It’s a question of money (big surprise!). The good stuff that Mauro wants costs $10 million. Culver is content to waste $2 million on the widely cussed paper trail printers.
They should put their egos aside for a minute and agree on one thing: to call on our state’s Congressmen to support the brand new HR 5036. That new bill by New Jersey’s Rush Holt pays for replacement equipment when states wise up and dump their DRE touchscreens. It is not a mandatory bill, so there is only one point of contention: Do we have the money in the federal budget to mop up the mess HAVA made of voting machines all over the nation. States that are loving their mess don’t have to do a thing. States that are ready to wash up can have the soap paid for by the Congress that caused this problem in the first place.
None of Iowa’s Congressmen have signed on to this bill yet. I called Latham’s office in Fort Dodge this morning. Can you do your part?
Boswell in Des Moines (toll free) (888) 432-1984
Braley in Davenport: (563) 323-5988 or more choices
Latham in Ames: 515-232-2885 or tom.latham@mail.house.gov Loebsack: email or in Cedar Rapids 319-363-2288
King on the web or in Sioux City call 712.224.4692
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.
As New Jersey enacted an exemplary election audit law and New Hampshire waded into another recount, Computerworld reporter Todd Weiss called Iowa to ask, Can audits restore confidence in elections? His inquiry is “Today’s Top Story” at the Computerworld website.
Weiss already knew that real paper ballots had saved Pottawattamie County in the 2006 primary when Auditor Drake turned off her errant scanner machines and counted ballots by hand.
Our Secretary of State Mike Mauro told Weiss
“I think there’s a place for post-election audits, where they are randomly selected, and of a certain percentage of the vote, to look for anomalies,” Mauro said. “It will [be] up for discussion this year. We will be discussing it this session.”
“First, we’re trying to get everybody across the state on the same machines first,” he said. Some Iowa counties are using optical-scan machines while others use DRE machines or a mix of the two. The goal is to move toward 100% use of optical scan machines, in part because such machines provide a verifiable paper trail.
“Random audits, of a certain percentage, I’m not opposed to any of that” to ensure accurate and fair elections, he said.
Parts of New Jersey’s law are being crafted into an Iowa bill. Next time Computerworld calls Iowa, here’s hoping it’s because we are more like NJ than like NH.
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.
These aren’t works of art, now, just work-a-day looks at the actual caucus, collected here in the interests of open and transparent vote counting methods.
If the Iowa Republican results are not yet available in more detail than we see here, then those results are not quite transparent. Somewhere someone had to add together the various precincts to get these county totals. No precinct can tell if the addition was correctly carried out because all the precinct numbers are unavailable. Have I missed the rest of the data somewhere?
Sorry but there will be no video posted from my caucus. There were only 12 persons in the Havelock Methodist Church and most said they did not want to appear on a YouTube video. I think most did not know what a YouTube video was, exactly, but they understood that they could get some notoriety and they were not so inclined.
My son attempted to shoot the proceedings anyway, keeping the camera on me all the time. It’s no fun to watch me while I listen to the debate about who is the best candidate, even though parts of the debate are clearly audible. So move along, there’s nothing to see here.
Meanwhile the Democratic reporting system is WAY COOL! Look it over if you haven’t done so. We got feedback to our caucus within minutes of our report because a man in NYC was watching the internet and phoned to tell us what it showed. He said we were the first precinct in our county to report. He read back the results to us because we did not have a computer or internet connection there in the church. Thanks to Howard S. for that help.
