I’ve mostly stopped writing about electronic voting machines since the state legislature got rid of the terrible touchscreens. The problem of electronically counted votes is still with us, however.
Yesterday the New York Times editorialized about states that count paper ballots by machine but do not double check the count. We just take the machine’s word for it. We should know better!
Electronic voting is notoriously vulnerable to technical glitches and vote theft. By now, most states have passed good laws requiring paper records of every vote cast — an important safeguard. But that is not enough. States also need strong audit laws to ensure that machine totals are vigilantly checked against the paper records. That is the only way that voters will be able to trust electronic voting.
The Times focuses on Florida but notes that most states are in the same blind spot.
Florida has a particularly flawed audit law — not a comforting thought given its recent history. . . . It’s easy to pick on Florida — and it deserves the criticism — but the problem is a national one. All states should require audits of all major races before election results are certified. They should require that a sufficiently large percentage of the ballots be checked to be statistically meaningful. States also need clear guidelines for what they will do — to investigate, and if necessary set aside flawed results — when a significant level of error is detected.
This fall’s election will likely go unaudited in Iowa. If the election is not close, momentum for audits will suffer. Our reform will be less than half finished until we get some eyes on the ballots to verify the machine count.
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.
Thanks to Iowa’s new voter registration law, you can vote June 3 even if you are not now registered. Just register at the polls. Or go to the county auditor’s office today to vote absentee (after you register under the new law).
These late registrations have tougher rules because you must prove your identity and residence in the precinct. Use your driver’s license or other government-issued photo id card. If the card shows an incorrect address, you can use other documents to establish your address: your lease, utility bill, bank statment, government document, or paycheck that shows your address.
OR — Get This!–go without any papers at all! Just go with another registered voter from your precinct and let that person swear you are who you say and you live in the precinct. This is so cool that I’m tempted to try it. I just need to find an unregistered voter who wants to vote in my singularly lackluster primary.
If you want to hear it from the Secretary of State, go here.
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.
It’s hard to keep a lid on information in the age of the internet. Steve King and the English-only crowd should learn their lesson.
The Iowa voter registration forms are again available in multiple languages. While the Secretary of State is forbidden by law from providing them to citizens, others can offer them. The Iowa Council for International Understanding has put Spanish, Bosnian, Laotian and Vietnamese versions of the forms on its website. The ICIU has long provided translation services to Iowans.
These are unofficial forms. They cannot be turned it to the voter registration office. They can be used only as an aid in completing the actual form which is also on-line here.
About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”
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.
Democrats tried to pass the bill under a suspension of the rules, a maneuver that requires a 2/3 majority. Such smooth sailing appeared possible because the bill had passed out of the House Administration committee unanimously. This time the same committee Republicans voted against the bill!
There were no mandates in the bill, only incentives for states to use verifiable methods of balloting, re-imbursements for new equipment, and money for auditing election returns.
He signed the bill that chases DRE touchscreens out of our state. He’s a better governor than he was Secretary of State.
Thank you, Governor Culver.
Secretary Mauro was on the radio yesterday, taking an hour long victory lap over this and same day voter registration. He’s a very credible Secretary of State with nearly 25 years of election administration under his belt.
Last week as the legislature was dumping touchscreens and mandating paper ballots, the American Statistical Association was getting into the debate. Their board adopted a “Position on Electoral Integrity” that reminds us to actually look at the paper ballots.
“It is critical that the integrity of central vote tabulations be confirmed by audits of voter-verified hard-copy records in order to provide high - and clearly specified - levels of confidence in electoral outcomes… Certification of any electoral outcome should require substantiating evidence that the putative winner was the intended selection of the plurality of voters.
That’s a clumsy way of saying, “Don’t let the scanner do all the thinking.”
A bill to require audits languishes in the legislature today. We’ll have the ballot system we wanted but we’re still using an insecure, fallible computer to read the votes and add the votes. We need to get our pollworkers eyes involved, too.
The House has followed the Senate, voting for paper ballot systems througout Iowa. The bill protects our next Presidential election from the terrible touchscreens:
Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary, for elections held on or after November 4, 2008, a county shall
use an optical scan voting system only. The requirements of
the federal Help America Vote Act relating to disabled voters
shall be met by a county through the use of electronic ballot
marking devices that are compatible with an optical scan
voting system.
It’s nice to see how non-controversial this has become. Although there was a grumpy editorial in the Dubuque newspaper this week, the current news story at the DM Register has not even drawn any anonymous comments as of this posting.
The Governor’s signature is expected in due course.
The Iowa Senate has taken us halfway out of the paperless touchscreen trap on a 47-1 vote for an all paper voting system. Jennifer Jacobs has the story.
One legislator said on the radio today that we are hereby modernizing our voting system. That sounds like a refrain from just 3 years ago when we were suckered into new touchscreens–the “modern” system of its (brief) time.
Jacobs reports that touchscreens “have fallen from favor in the last couple of years as watchdog groups rail about equipment failures and security vulnerabilities.” She ought to say that the really credible watchdogs have been computer scientists. And they were “railing” in plenty of time to have avoided this whole fiasco, had the election officials been listening.
Michael Mauro listened. He never fell into the touchscreen trap. Now he is getting us out. Next step: the Iowa House.
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.
