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?
This falls short of what the Dems have done.
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.
Here’s a short version of a platform plank being advocated by Iowans for Voting Integrity. The full resolution is in the comment section below, as is another resolution for auditing election returns. Take these to your caucus if you want verifiable elections.
WHEREAS, an accurate and verifiable tabulation of votes is essential to democracy, and
WHEREAS, direct-recording electronic voting machines do not allow the voters to see how their votes are recorded and do not allow for an independent recount, and
WHEREAS, experience in other states has shown that adding printers to electronic voting machines in an attempt to produce a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail fails to resolve either basic security issues or the difficulties of conducting recounts on this equipment, and
WHEREAS, voter-marked paper ballots, counted by optical scanners or by hand, provide the most reliable record of voter intent,
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that we support allocation of sufficient state funds for counties to replace all direct-recording electronic voting machines with optical scanners and ballot marking devices to serve voters with disabilities, in time for the November 2008 General Election; and
THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we support federal legislation allocating funds to reimburse states for purchase of optical scanners and ballot marking devices.
The Republican straw poll will be posted precinct-by-precinct on a board at the the Polk County Convention Center tomorrow night. It will be potentially possible to verify the whole Republican vote process. This news came to me second hand (Thanks SF) from a voting integrity activist extraordinare.
A Republican caucus attendee must see the votes counted at the local precinct and then must see the totals board in Des Moines. That is not practical for most people, but campaigns can at least design phone trees for themselves if they want to have some feedback to the precincts about what got posted in Des Moines. Maybe someone can shoot a video of the big posting board every 15 minutes and put it on You Tube. It may not be as cool as what the Dems have done, but it has fewer layers of software, so that’s one advantage.
The Iowa Democratic Party has created a website that will show caucus results for each precinct as soon as they are reported to Des Moines via telephone. This is a virtual paper trail for this event, and very good news.
http://www.iowacaucusresults.com/
This practice is known as aggregating the vote in public. It is recommended by the DNC here. All counties should do it in every election. That is to say, they should promptly publish the precinct totals to the web on election night, right after they post the totals in the window of the precinct polling station. The Iowa Democratic Party is leading the way. Let’s hope the new Secretary of State (a Democrat) follows suit in June for the primary election.
I already announced my intention to post a video of my caucus on YouTube. Part of the video will show us phoning in the results of the delegate selection. I’ll also get someone who is not at the caucus to send back the results as soon as they appear on the internet. We’ll have confirmation that the world knows our outcome. That will be on the video, too.
from Common Cause Iowa here’s just what you need for Thursday night—
Resolution to support passage of the Fair Elections Now Act (US Senate File 1285) and Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (Iowa House File 805 & Senate File 553)
WHEREAS, our political system at all levels is increasingly dominated by the influence of large sums of private money that finance electoral campaigns, diminishing the right of all Iowans to equal and meaningful participation in the democratic process, and
WHEREAS, a number of states – including Arizona, Maine and Connecticut – have adopted systems of clean elections which provide full public financing for primary and general campaigns to candidates who opt to run “clean campaigns,” and
WHEREAS, such voluntary voter owned election laws have helped to restore democracy and public confidence in the election and governing processes of those states; and
WHEREAS, the State Government Committee of the Iowa House and Senate, have approved HF805 and SF 553 – the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) on a bi-partisan basis, and US Senate File 1285, the Fair Elections Now Act, has been proposed in the US Senate;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the (Iowa Democratic Party or Republican Party of Iowa) supports the Voter Owned Iowa Clean Elections Act (VOICE) and Fair Elections Now Act, to establish an election system in which candidates could choose to forego fundraising from private sources, accept spending limits and receive a set amount of money from a publicly financed election fund.
You Tube and the Des Moines Register have teamed up to host your video about the Iowa caucus in your precinct. Go for it!!! Lights, camera, action!
Here’s what I hope to see. Make sure to carefully identify your precinct and county at the beginning of your video. Include a scene of the caucus result being phoned in to party HQ. Get close enough to hear the caller and hope he (she) talks you through the call as various buttons are pushed for each candidate.
If you do that, the Iowa Democratic caucuses will be completely transparent. That’s our goal here at Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections. IDP intends to have a website that will report results precinct-by-precinct. The video will attest that the web results actually happened. One part of the internet will be checking on another part of the internet. It’s a new form of checks and balances.
This won’t work for the Republican caucuses since all their results go into a back room somewhere and get totalled up by cigar-chomping hacks—er—by devout deacons of the party faithful. Anyway, you can’t check or balance what they do. But you can still post a video of your caucus. I look forward to seeing some.
I’ll try to get my son to record the caucus in this precinct. I’ll have a link here as soon as he gets it posted.
Even I don’t agree with this Iowa caucus participant, but it’s nice to see the voters haven’t forgotten about our problematic voting machines. Look at this report filed from LeMars–
Claire Packard is an undecided voter. “The biggest issue I think is the voting machines and the progress that government has to make to get them up and going next year.”
Luckily the caucusses don’t use voting machines, so Iowa has a little more time to get ready. Voter Packard may be aware of the turmoil over voting machines that has rocked California, Ohio, New York, and Colorado in recent months. All’s quiet in Iowa, though, as our auditors try to implement our new paper trail law in a way they can be proud of. Stay tuned.
Iowa’s Democratic Party will take a big step forward in election reporting on January 3, 2008. They will report results from each precinct on a website. Caucus attendees will not have to wonder if their results were correctly tallied by some black box at the other end of the phone line used for reporting the winners.
Like in 2004 the precinct chairmen will use a touchtone phone to enter their results without actually talking to anyone at party headquarters. In 2004 there was no way to know if the phone system properly recorded or tallied the results. That will change in 2008, according to Carrie Giddens, communications director, who wrote this Friday:
The Iowa Democratic Party will have a public website displaying the caucus results as they are reported by each precinct. This website will show a number of things but will include the number of county delegates won by each candidate in each precinct, which will allow anyone around the world to see the caucus results down to the precinct level.
This follows the advice of the DNC in this document about public aggregation of election results.
I don’t know the website address yet or how timely it will be. I was told the techies at the Iowa Democratic Party were concerned that they might need an inordinate amount of bandwidth just to accommodate all the curious websurfers who would hit the site on caucus night. The real purpose of the site is to verify the vote for the candidates and the precinct people who phoned it in, but many stay-at-home types (and many Republcans) will be checking on their local result, so this seems like a realistic fear. Here’s hoping they have figured out how to handle it. And congratulations to them for making the effort.
How long before the Republicans can match this?
Poweshiek County auditor Diana Dawley saved money for the small towns in her jurisdiction Tuesday by letting them count paper ballots by hand. The alternative would have been to pay for programming of touchscreen voting machines.
Before the voting Dawley told the Grinnell Herald-Register
We don’t anticipate high voter turnout because there’s not much competition in the smaller communites this time, and we felt it could be a cost savings to the cities to use paper ballots instead of having the voting machine cards programmed for the election.
It just seemed to make sense to simplify things . . . A lot of people would like to get back to paper ballots.
Cheaper, simpler, popular. What’s not to like?
[Thanks to B.B. for finding this story in the Grinnell paper, which is not on the web.]
Our former Secretary of State, having overseen the purchase of new voting equipment during his tenure, NOW wants to reconsider. He seeks our opinion of a vote-by-mail regime as a way to (1) solve the paper trail problem and (2) boost turnout. Democrat Gronstal nods, but Republican Zieman resists.
Why didn’t Mr. Culver mention this when he was SoS? Because he was so intent on succeeding Vilsack as Governor that he dared not make any waves. Instead he concentrated on saying what good elections we ran in Iowa, and on boosting turnout with cheerleading and absentee ballots.
He let counties spend their federal money on paperless black boxes masquarading as high tech election equipment. Last spring he cut money from the state budget that could have solved the paper trail problem by eliminating the touchscreens. As a result many counties will be adding poor quality printers to their dubious touchscreens. This is mal-administration.
Moving to all mail voting will mean ditching the touchscreens, which should be done, of course. But moving to scannable paper ballots in the touchscreen counties is a far simpler and cheaper way to get a paper trail.
Will turnout be higher? If we want high turnout we need high stakes elections where people see a reason to vote. My hometown saw its turnout triple on Tuesday as the mayor and one councilman were ousted in a blue collar revolt.
If we want higher turnout, we could try public financing of some races. (Are you still there, Mr. Gronstal?) That gets new candidates who are barred by the present need to raise money just to run for state representative.
So I’m with Zieman on this one. Zieman said
“Having worked with Governor Culver on election reform, there’s always a motive to his madness.”
I wonder what it is.
Tuesday is municipal election day in Iowa. The Iowa code appears to require that small towns use paper ballots (not touchscreens) if turnout is expected to be light. Look here:
49.26 COMMISSIONER TO DECIDE METHOD OF VOTING –
COUNTING OF BALLOTS.
1. In all elections regulated by this chapter, the voting shall be by ballots printed and distributed as provided by law, or by voting machines meeting the requirements of chapter 52.
2. When voting machines are available for an election precinct, the commissioner shall determine in advance of each election conducted for a city of three thousand five hundred or less population or any school district in which voting occurs in that precinct whether voting there shall be by machine or paper ballot.
If the commissioner concludes, on the basis of voter turnout for recent similar elections and factors considered likely to affect voter turnout for the forthcoming election, that voting will probably be so light as to make preparation and use of paper ballots less expensive than preparation and use of a voting machine, paper ballots shall be used.
The quoted passage refers also to school board elections. As I reported in September, Pocahontas county used touchscreens for an uncontested election. By my reading of the code, that should not have happened.
In July I asked my auditor about the use of ordinary paper ballots versus the cost of preparing the touchscreens for minor elections. No answer so far, but its only been 100 days.
Two local election officials quoted in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald have tried to discount the striking undervote study released last week by Iowans for Voting Integrity. Both made comments that suggest they have not read the study.
Delaware County Auditor Carla Becker said “I don’t think they are allowing for voter discretion or apathy when it comes to some races. . .Judges’ elections are always the worst.”
Maybe so, but the study did not cover judges races. It covered only the race for Governor. It’s not likely that voters in touchscreen counties were so apathetic that they skipped the top race at twice the rate of neighboring counties where no touchscreens were used.
Tom O’Neill, Dubuque County deputy commissioner of elections, was quoted as saying “Iowans for Voting Integrity are concerned about undervotes, saying the touch screens are dropping votes, but they have nothing to back that up.”
Yes, they do. They have the study. It’s short. Read it here.
O’Neill went on to add, “I’m not convinced that the machines are doing it. It could be voter mistake.”
Yes, it could be. Does O’Neill approve of equipment that appears to cause so many mistakes? Why should his Dubuque county results show an undervote rate of less than one percent while neighboring Jackson county’s undervote rate is four times as high at 3.1 percent? Is it because Jackson county’s befuddled voters make more mistakes–or because Jackson county uses only touchscreens?
There’s also real news in the Telegraph-Herald story. Reporter Mary Rae Bragg reveals that counties cannot buy paper trail printers for touchscreens because the voting machine companies have stopped selling them! The vendors blame the uncertainty of pending federal legislation.
That’s just as well. Paper trail printers for touchscreens are a poor substitute for the real thing–paper ballots marked by voters. All counties should switch to that.
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.
