Iowa Voters

Would Republican Senators kiss off Michigan autoworkers if the electoral college were abolished? This year they hoped McCain could carry Michigan, but when he didn’t, Senators saw no need to treat factories the way they treated banks just three months ago.

Many of Michigan’s own Republican state legistlators have now voted to close the electoral college(scroll down). On the same day the US Senate scorned them, Michigan voted for the National Popular Vote.

When Iowa was a swing state (2000 and 2004), we were unlikely to want the electoral college repealed. If we are now seen as increasingly Democratic, maybe our legislature will also pass the National Popular Vote lest we be left out of the fall campaign. The bill was in our legislature last session but went nowhere.

UPDATE: After this post was old, I learned that voter intent standards had been used in some Iowa recounts. So my interpretation of Iowa Code must be in error.

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They have begun the recount in the Senate race in Minnesota. Originally the ballots were scanned as Iowa ballots are scanned, but the close outcome led to the recount.

Minnesota is a “voter intent” state. Iowa is not. In Iowa “The mark shall be consistent with the requirements of the voting system in use in the precinct.” see Code of Iowa 49.92 and 49.99. In Minnesota the recount teams must determine what the voter really wanted no matter what way he used to mark his ballot. Ballots that the machine read one way could legitimately be read differently by the recounters.

Here’s a sample of Minnesota ballots you can judge. As you view them, consider this: would the ballot be counted differently in Iowa than in Minnesota?

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.

Updated below.

With all the scare stories now arising about the upcoming election, it’s time to remind ourselves that Iowa looks pretty good. We won’t have (shouldn’t have) long lines to vote on election day. We won’t have any touchscreens to go awry. We won’t have many registration problems. Let’s review our enviable situation.

No Touchscreens. This is Iowa’s signature accomplishment. We owe a big debt to Secretary of State Mauro who traded in the touchscreens as his first major step in office. Now all of us get to vote on paper. Polling places can arrange as many ballot marking booths as they need to prevent lines of voters. No votes will be lost to the dastardly touchscreen gadgets. It’s because of this victory that this blog has been so quiet lately. No sense in pointing out the state’s shortcomings when such a major change has just been engineered.

No Registration Problems. Iowans can register until the end of next week. If they miss that date, they get a second chance on election day. This means hardly any provisional ballots will be needed. Everyone with a good ID card should be able to vote without any prior preparation. You can check your registration right now at this website.

The Brennan Center (with help from Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity) has released a major report on the status of election readiness. Iowa is one of eight states given credit for “best practices” in ballot accounting and reconciliation. See the third map.

On the other hand, we fall into the black space on the bottom map regarding audits of the machine readout. That’s Mauro’s next challenge. Someone needs to hand count some ballots after the polls close to see that the machines got it right in their hi-speed readings. Haste makes waste! Slow down and double check the damned things!

That challenge is for the government to face next legislative session. If we get good audits we can join the list of only six states that get shaded green on the top map (Alaska, Oregon, California, North Carolina, and our neighbors Missouri and Minnesota).

For now the voters should see a welcoming environment at the polls. Any snafus will be local–not the fault of state law. Take advantage of our enviable situation by voting.

Update: Secretary of State Mauro has also been recognized for having the best official state election website in the nation! Talk about a welcoming environment! So look him up if you need to know anything about Iowa voting. Congratulations, Michael.

Why are so many things secret about the elections? THe secret software that runs voting machines isn’t the only thing being kept from the public:

Debate watchdog group Open Debates calls on the Commission on Presidential Debates to make public the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Senator Lindsay Graham of the McCain campaign and Representative Rahm Emanuel of the Obama campaign have negotiated a detailed contract that dictates the terms of the 2008 presidential debates, including who can participate and the structure of the formats. The Commission on Presidential Debates has agreed to implement the debate contract.

Yet, in order to shield the major party candidates from criticism, the Commission on Presidential Debates has refused to release the debate contract to the public.

”It is vital that the public has full access to information in a sound democracy,” said George Farah, executive director of Open Debates. “Unfortunately, the Commission on Presidential Debates is more concerned with the partisan interests of the two candidates than the democratic interests of the public, and it has denied voters access to critical information about our most sacred political forums.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates was created by and for the Republican and Democratic Parties. In 1986, the Republican and Democratic National Committees ratified an agreement “to take over the presidential debates” from the League of Women Voters. Fifteen months later, then-Republican Party chair Frank Fahrenkopf and then-Democratic Party chair Paul Kirk incorporated the Commission on Presidential Debates. Fahrenkopf and Kirk still co-chair the Commission on Presidential Debates, and every four years, it implements and conceals contracts jointly drafted by the Republican and Democratic nominees.

A copy of the 2004 debate contract negotiated by the Bush and Kerry campaigns is available at:
http://www.opendebates.org/news/documents/debateagreement.pdf

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One secret is out: They are keeping Libertarian Bob Barr off the stage despite public support for including him. He’s on the ballot in most states.

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.

From the AP in Indiana:

By DEBORAH HASTINGS

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.

Representatives King and Latham joined 85% of the Republicans in the US House yesterday to vote down a paper ballot bill that could have re-imbursed Iowa for the expense of replacing our touchscreens.

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.

Thank you Secretary Mauro.

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.