Iowa Voters

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.

Congress is in chaos over the Holt bill, HR 811. It was even called “Microsoft 811″ yesterday by Alcee Hastings, a Floridian on the Rules Committee which refused to advance the bill.

Courtesy of activist Bob Bancroft from VotersUnite.org here are 7 steps you can take in the wake of this blowup:

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Action Plan: 7 Easy Steps to Keep the Signal Loud & Clear

(1) Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Chair, House Rules Committee
(202) 225-3615, Fax (202) 225-7822
Applaud Rep. Slaughter’s courageous stand against the serious flaws in the Holt bill. Ask her to insist on a good bill. Urge her to resist any pressure from House leadership to move a badly compromised bill forward.

(2) Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Member, House Rules Committee
(202) 225-1313, Fax (202) 225-1171
Applaud Rep. Hastings’ powerful stand on behalf of We the People. Let him know that he has your full support as he continues to insist on complete transparency and disclosure in our elections.

(3) David Dreier (R-CA), Ranking Minority Member, House Rules Committee
(202) 225-2305, Fax (202) 225-7018
Ask Rep. Dreier to begin to play a constructive role, on behalf of his party, in this important debate. Remind him of the compelling results of CA’s own Top-to-Bottom review. He knows these machines are not fit for use in our elections. We all know it. Ask him to help transfer that knowledge into law.

(4) Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Majority Leader
202.225.3130 (Leader’s office), (202) 225-4131 (Personal office), Fax (202) 225-4300
Tell Rep. Hoyer that he must cease his continued attempts to force expensive, unfit, unwanted technology upon us. With the help of People For the American Way, he has managed to steer this bill even further off course. The reaction of his own party, and the subsequent exploitation of this by House Republicans, is a direct result of Hoyer’s bad judgment. Help him get his priorities straight!

(5) Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House
(202) 225-0100 (Speaker’s office), (202) 225-4965 (Personal office)
Tell Speaker Pelosi that her leadership is needed on this issue. Explain to her that the Majority Leader has been unduly influenced by lobbyists like Jim Dickson, and that he is attempting to force a bill that neither the American people, nor even ranking members of her own party, desire. Ask Speaker Pelosi to intervene, and help deliver a clean bill that will restore the public confidence in our elections.

(6) Susan Davis (D-CA)
(202) 225-2040, Fax (202) 225-2948
Thank Rep. Davis for her brave amendment to curtail DREs. Let her know that she is on the right track, and that she has the support of many, including grassroots watchdog groups, large advocacy groups such as MoveOn.org, and major periodicals such as The New York Times. Ask her to consider revising her amendment to require an outright ban on DRE voting, along with full disclosure and transparency in our elections.

(7) John Boehner (R-OH), Minority Leader
(202) 225-4000 (Leader’s office), Fax (202) 225-5117 (Leader’s), (202) 225-6205 (Personal office)
Ask Rep. Boehner to do something more constructive than simply poking fun at Democrats who disagree with each other. Remind him that Rep. Slaughter took the right stand, and should not be chastised for it. Tell Rep. Boehner that he should work with his party to offer a clean bill that addresses the following core requirements: (1) full transparency and disclosure, (2) full deference to States rights, (3) an end to the failed experiment of electronic voting. Tell him that you are counting on him to set aside the partisan politics, and work with all interested parties to address the badly eroded public confidence in our elections.

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Yesterday I made the calls I was asking you to make. It took less than a minute for each one and the note-taker at the Congressional office was accommodating in each case. Surely you can find one or more of these calls appealing to you. The calls to Davis and Hastings should be especially fun to make. As soon as I push the Publish button for this post, I’ll start my own calling, so if you get a busy signal, that’s probably me tying up the line. Let freedom RING!

UPDATED BELOW—ANOTHER UPDATE–THIRD UPDATE

Washington Congressman Norm Dicks told one of his constituents that Congress was being “inundated with calls in favor of the Ban-DRE amendment.” DRE is lingo for touchscreen voting machines.

The calls came pouring in when a rumor arose that the House Rules committee would allow a vote on such an amendment when the Holt paper trail bill reaches the floor. At this writing it is unclear if the Rules committee has adopted such a rule or even if the bill will make it to the floor this week as had been expected.

So YOU have time to call, too. DREs are the evil heart of the election Frankenstein we deal with today. Every time they are investigated by impartial computer scientists, DREs flunk. They should definitely be banned.

Here’s the Rules Committee phone number: 202-225-9091

For good measure, here’s the phone of Rules chairwoman Louise Slaughter of NY: Phone: (202) 225-3615
Fax: (202) 225-7822

And don’t forget your own Representative:

Bruce Braley (202) 225-2911
Dave Loebsack http://loebsack.house.gov/contactform
Leonard Boswell Phone: (202) 225-3806
Fax: (202) 225-5608
Tom Latham– Toll Free:866-428-5642
Steve King–Phone: 202.225.4426
Fax: 202.225.3193

Let freedom ring!

UPDATE: Thursday’s New York Times has editorialized in favor of the DRE ban:

It is unfortunate that the bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. A touch-screen ban would encourage states to use optical scan machines, which rely on paper ballots read by a computer, like a standardized test form. Optical scans are less expensive and less vulnerable to vote theft.

There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting. If the House fails to do so, the Senate should, and it should fight for it to be in the final bill.

Read it here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Expect this bill to be taken up by the Rules Committee Friday morning. Call now. Ask them to allow a DRE ban amendment or even ask to have an “open rule” which will allow any amendments that may be drafted as the bill is debated.

THIRD UPDATE: Friday Rules Committee meeting cancelled. Use the extra time to tell your own Congressman what you think. They are paying attention now!

Once called HR 811, but now called Microsoft 811 by some, Representative Rush Holt’s paper trail bill is set for a vote this week in the US House. Some former backers of Holt’s efforts have jumped ship and want you to jump, too.

Many good points of the original bill are gone now:

1. Software disclosure demands got removed. The bill now bars public disclosure of software.

2. Internet connections were banned in the bill last winter, as were any type of wireless connections. Both now suffer from muddled language added in committee.

Here’s the conclusion of Ellen Theisen, an early paper ballot advocate:

In my opinion, the flaws in this bill are more damaging to democracy and our future election process than the good that might come of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our elections in 2008 and beyond. So, far from celebrating that a Holt election reform bill will finally come to the floor for a vote as I might have been back in 2003, or even 2005, I am now filled with sadness. This bill should never be passed as it is currently written.

Others still back the bill. Verified Voting (started by California professor David Dill) needed over 2200 words to explain why it backs the bill in spite of all the negative changes it has undergone this summer. Their closing words are cautionary at best:

The proposed changes to the Committee bill open the door for hundreds of millions to be spent on touch screen equipment and flawed inaccessible printers in 2008 — equipment that would need to be replaced yet again in 2012. We still believe the good in the bill outweighs these changes, but we urge Congress to implement these reasonable corrections as the bill moves forward.

So even the bills backers hope it won’t be enacted without some improvements. Typically the argument goes like this–”Pass this bill, anyway, because the Senate can do better. Then the conference committee will select the best from both bills. We hope.”

Trouble is, there is no better bill that has any legs in the Senate. There are worse bills in the Senate.

Passing what’s still called HR 811 appears to be as risky as defeating it.

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.

Update: See the comment section for news of a parallel election planned for tomorrow at the Iowa Straw Poll. Organizers will count those ballots in public! Good for them.

Two guests of WHO talker Jan Mickelson demanded Wednesday that the Republican straw poll be conducted in such a way that the ballots are always in public view and be counted in public. Two more guests from the Iowa Republican party were unable to say who had actually programmed the vote counting machines and denied that anyone would want to manipulate the result anyway.

Republicans generally have not been engaged by the voting machine debate and it showed in the inability of the two Republicans, Chuck Laudner and Ted Sporer, to hold their own against the critics, Bob Schultz and James Condit. Sporer tried to compensate with bluster and threats against the critics.

The case against voting machines was buttressed by UI’s Doug Jones in the second part of the show. He cited all the studies by computer scientists which have concluded we have inferior equipment for vote counting.

Listen to the show here.

Another point made by the critics was that the straw poll has become a quasi-public event because so many county auditors, the state auditor and Story county’s voting machines are all involved.

At the end of the show a caller asked the obvious question: Why use such complicated equipment for such a simple poll? There will be only one mark on each ballot. Hand counts would be more fun, transparent and quick enough.