Iowa Voters

Our Secretary of State still wants to see your ID. Make that a photo ID with an expiration date on it, please, so your Iowa State student ID card will not suffice.

You need it unless you vote absentee, or get someone to swear you are really you, or swear it yourself if you are in a nursing home and can’t vote like other absentee voters. Or unless you have a religious objection or swear you are indigent. In those last two cases we break out the dreaded provisional ballots again.

With that many loopholes his new bill offers way more inconvenience, hassle, confusion, and expense for the state than it offers security for already honest elections.

The Secretary admitted that he knows of no impersonations that could justify this law. He absurdly says the only way to know if they are happening is to video tape voters coming into the polling places. If the Secretary photographed everyone entering the polls, he’d still need a way to identify the photos. Who can claim that these voters were someone else?

He cited the pranksters in New Hampshire this month who recorded themselves lying about who they were in their effort to show they could lie about who they were. They actually were given ballots, but then they ran off without voting. I think they knew it was a crime already.

I wonder how many hours the Secretary spent studying election records to see whether any votes were cast by voters who had died the week before the election. This is the main avenue for voter fraud that might go undetected. It shouldn’t be very hard to study this. The list of who voted is in his possession. Deaths are pretty public, too, along with the date of death.

The Secretary also said the ID card is not a real barrier to voters. He said that in Indiana turnout was higher after the law went into effect than it was before the law. But turnout goes up when population goes up. It also goes up when voters are more interested in the candidates.

Turnout is poor evidence in this debate where only a few voters are going to be affected. Schultz really should hope turnout goes down. That might prove his ID law had deterred fraud. Or it might prove he had disenfranchised people.

Since Schultz can’t prove any actual impersonations, he justified his bill by pointing to close elections. He said even a few impersonations could matter in a close race. But he also admitted a “very limited number of people” would not get to vote under his new rules. Those few voters could also matter in a close race. He has created a problem bigger than the one he is claiming to solve.

Voters don’t know which races will be that close. Elections aren’t stolen by voter impersonators. They are stolen via absentee ballots sometimes. That would certainly be the way to go in Iowa whether this law passes or not.

In fact his bill may not pose much of a barrier. To be denied your ballot, you would have to show up alone and not see anyone in the room who could sign for you. That may happen in the city, but rural Republicans have nothing to fear. What a coincidence.

What Schultz really needs is evidence this impersonation crime has actually happened. Good luck with that. The recent allegation that 953 South Carolina dead voters had cast ballots began to fall apart as soon as a few of the names were checked by the state election department. The rest of the list remains secret and in the hands of the accusing Dept. of Motor Vehicles. Something is rotten in Columbia, S.C. It smells all the way to Des Moines.

The photo above is from the Sandusky (OH) Register.
Hat tip to Radio Iowa’s audio.
cross-posted to Bleeding Heartland, where comments are allowed.

Republicans took a ribbing during Iowa’s recent caucuses because they did not practice what they preach. They did not require their own voters to show a photo ID card before allowing them to vote for a Presidential candidate.

Now some Republican dirty tricksters have tried to make their case for ID cards in a novel way—by committing a crime. They went to New Hampshire polls and got ballots for people who had just died. They filmed themselves doing it(embedded here). This is supposed to prove that ID cards are needed. Actually it proves something else.

Two things, in fact First it proves the crime of impersonating a voter is already well deterred. The tricksters never cast the ballots that were given to them. They merely left the polling place as soon as they had been handed the blank ballot. Even for the sake of their propaganda, they knew better than to carry this crime any farther.

But if it’s not worth the risk even in this case where they were in control of events, how much less is it worth the risk of actually casting just one fraudulent vote into a sea of thousands of legitimate votes? At one polling place the trickster was spotted by a poll worker who recognized he was using the name of a recently deceased man. This inconvenient fact was not included in the propaganda video.

The likelihood of altering the outcome is so tiny that no voters ever take this risk. Voters are smarter than tricksters, as we shall see shortly.

The trick also reveals something else inadvertently–that the crime is so rare no good evidence of it exists. It has to be staged. Ask your friends if they know of any cases. Ask if they have ever gone to vote only to learn they had already been impersonated by a previous voter. Better yet ask our Secretary of State Schultz how many voters ever report to him that they have been stopped from voting for this reason. You won’t find much evidence.

Now that video of this crime has been released, it turns out that merely “obtaining” a ballot in someone else’s name is a crime. It wasn’t necessary to cast the ballot. They may already be guilty.

Why didn’t they stage this trick at the Iowa Republican caucus sites? Because it would have made Republicans look bad. It still does.

The eyes of the world are upon us, but not only to see who is declared the winner of the GOP caucus Tuesday night. Some are trying to see just how the votes get added up. A reader from Florida writes:

While researching the Iowa Caucus process I came across your website. I was just wondering if you were aware that the Iowa GOP has decided to tally the votes in an undisclosed location this year due to an anonymous threat to ’shut down’ the caucus. This is very concerning to me and I was wondering what your take is being that you’re much more familiar with the Iowa election process than I am. I have heard that Iowa is one of the most transparent states in terms of voting, but wouldn’t counting the votes in secret open up the potential for serious vote fraud? Knowing that the Iowa GOP is not very fond of the current front runner in Iowa I am even more suspicious.

Indeed. It’s easy to imagine the whole Republican Party in the corner with Mitt Romney, hoping to hold off the Paulites and the Gingrich disaster, willing to do anything to save their careers from the hoi polloi. Might they even move their vote counting to an undisclosed location? Sure, even their beloved VP hangs out there!

The party continually points out that votes are counted at the caucus site and everyone can watch as they are phoned in to Des Moines. But then what?

Can a handful of candidate staff in Des Moines keep track of 1700 sets of of results pouring in all at once?

We know this can be done right because the Iowa Democrats did it properly in 2008. Those results were reported to an automated system that promptly put them on the internet. Caucus sites that had an internet connection could verify that their results were correctly posted to the world. Why didn’t Republicans adopt that method this time? Why are they waiting two weeks to publish their returns? (two weeks???)

As my correspondent in Florida continues–

I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but I [don’t] exactly have the utmost faith in the modern election process. . . . It certainly doesn’t help that these organizations seem to quickly change the process at the last minute. One example from the recent Florida straw poll was when the voting window was suddenly changed without notice and ticket carrying convention attendees were send home without getting to cast a vote.

He also asks what he can do to remove the doubt. Perhaps the famously networked Ron Paul campaign could set up a website similar to the one Iowa Democrats used in 2008 and publish a parallel set of results that can be seen on-line instantly by people at every caucus. Probably not all precincts would participate in their duplicate reporting system, but it would function as a large, unscientific exit poll and a spot check on the official results.

Short of that local voters can’t know their totals were correctly placed in the larger totals until the two weeks pass. That is antedeluvian.

A local judge in Pennsylvania’s Venango County has dismissed the local election board. The board was investigating the county’s iVotronic touchscreen voting machines. They had hired university experts to delve into complaints of machine misbehavior during the May 2011 primary.

Although their investigation was not yet complete, they had received an interim report from their investigator, David Eckhardt of Carnegie-Mellon University, which you can read here

Luckily Iowa no longer uses touchscreen machines (Thank you Michael Mauro!), so this report is of limited local interest. It’s published here as a reminder of how close we came to the turmoil touchscreens can cause. The Pennsylvania drama will continue, as the fired board has gone to court this week seeking a stay of execution. Can you imagine that happening in Iowa just a month before our Presidential caucuses?

Good luck to Marybeth Kuznik of VotePA.us and all the others who are working to make their elections as transparent as the Iowa caucuses.

A columnist for the Mason City newspaper has defended Cerro Gordo’s top election official from a “cheap shot” taken by our Secretary of State Matt Schultz.

Schultz apparently went out of his way to pick a fight (deja vu) with County Auditor Ken Kline over requiring voter ID cards.

He [Kline] was asked by a constituent at a Board of Supervisors meeting what he thought of the proposed law.

“Am I opposed to it? No. But what problem are we solving?” asked Kline.

He said to his knowledge, Iowa never had a problem of someone voting in someone else’s place.

In his response to Kline, Schultz, in a letter to the editor to the Globe Gazette, said people have to show photo IDs to get on an airplane or to get a checking account, so why not when they vote?

. . .
The really unfair comment from Schultz was when he wrote, in reference to Kline, “We must elect men and women who will stand up for fair and honest elections.”

Who knows what he meant by that?

The newspaper went on to cite Kline’s outstanding record, concluding that “he’s a stand-up guy who deserves better than to take a cheap shot from a state official for simply answering a question from a constituent.”

Schultz offered this cheap shot because he has no legitimate answer to Kline’s question: What problem will we solve with Schultz’s pet idea? There is no problem. The Schultz “solution” will cost Iowa lots of money and will inconvenience voters. Kline is right to question it. The Globe-Gazette is right to defend him.

Iowa has only dipped its toe into the vortex of email voting. Other states are diving in because it sounds so convenient. They should step back if they want their ballots to be secure.

Here’s computer security expert David Jefferson, writing two weeks ago:

I am very concerned about the widespread push toward Internet voting in the U.S., of which email voting is just one kind. Neither the Internet itself, nor voters’ computers, nor the email vote collection servers are secure against any of a hundred different cyber attacks that might be launched by anyone in the world from a self-aggrandizing loner to a foreign intelligence agency. Such an attack might allow automated and undetectable modification or loss of any or all of the votes transmitted.

While all Internet voting systems are vulnerable to such attacks and thus should be unacceptable to anyone, email voting is by far the worst Internet voting choice from a national security point of view since it is the easiest to attack in the largest number of different ways.

Jefferson goes on to list some of the pitfalls beginning with lack of privacy. Iowa allows return of ballots by email only for people in war zones. We require the voter to acknowledge in writing that he understands his ballot is no longer secret.

But Jefferson goes on to list more pitfalls Iowa is not acknowledging: Vote manipulation while in transit, malware being attached to the email ballot, server attacks, denial of service attacks, etc.

He is not expecting things to get more secure in the future:

These facts will not change: These vulnerabilities are facts about email voting. They are fundamentally built in to the architecture of email, of the Internet itself, and of the PCs and mobile devices that people vote from, and are not going to change for as far ahead into the future as anyone can see. Anyone’s security claims to the contrary should be treated with extreme skepticism. No amount of encryption (even if it were used for some parts of the voting infrastructure), no amount of firewalling, no use of strong passwords or two factor authentication, no amount of voter signature checking, and no other security tricks of the trade are sufficient to materially change these facts.

All the same problems apply to ballots returned by FAX, Jefferson says.

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz is warning about unauthorized voting. He claims–without evidence–that Iowa should fear impersonators at the polling place. He thinks he can prevent this by requiring voters to produce photo ID cards. He says this will make our elections more secure.

If this is not just a voter suppression scheme, if he really worries about secure voting, he should hold the line against email voting.

cross-posted at Bleeding Heartland.

Iowa has become the first state to complete its redistricting. Congressmen did not get to use their influence to draw districts who would re-elect them. Legislators did not draw districts to maximize their chances to control the legislature after the next election. The Governor did not hold the whole map hostage to unrelated demands.

Iowa has the best redistricting system in the USA. We have objective and fair rules for drawing the districts. We have a fair process for accepting or rejecting the map that is produced by professional staff. We had the wisdom to let the chips fall where they fell.

This is one of our main claims to being a good government state. The legislators long ago who established this system should be proud.

When Iowans elected a new Secretary of State in November, county election officials (Auditors) adapted quickly. Secretary-elect Schultz had already riled the auditors during the campaign. He had insinuated that voting rolls were improperly managed, and he had called for new laws to block imaginary illegal voters.

The auditors initiated a study of photo ID requirements for voters when Schultz told them he would press for such a law in Iowa. A handful of other states have a similar requirement. Seven auditors traveled to two of those states, Indiana and Florida. Their 14-page report is now available on the front page of their website.

Reading between the lines of the report one can see the ID laws don’t prevent this imaginary fraud so much as move it to a new place in the voting system. Voters can escape the photo requirement by voting absentee in Indiana, for example. One Indiana official said he encourages voters to use absentee ballots if the ID rule is a stumbling block for them. However, the Iowa report notes

Since mailed absentee ballots are already the area of the election process that is most prone to voter fraud, this “go-around” actually opens the election process to greater potential for voter fraud.

Indeed Indiana and Florida each cite their own history of absentee ballot fraud yet both still permit absentee voters.

It is not clear if either state relies on the photo rule anyway. Indiana absentees avoid the photo law. At the polls it is common to rely more on signature similarity than to study the photo ID, according to one Indiana official. Furthermore, Indiana allows names that don’t exactly match each other, citing ten variations of the name J. Crew, for example, that would all be allowed to vote with the same ID card.

Florida voters can avoid presenting a photo if they have two forms of ID or if their signature on voting day matches a prior signature in the state’s database.

Look-alike brothers Bill Jones and Bob Jones could probably vote for each other in Indiana as easily as in Iowa. People with paperwork skills can probably navigate the system with little hassle. I don’t think the voter ID demand is even intending to stop them, both because it is so rare that one voter impersonates another, and because that is no way to steal an election.

This campaign may be driven by a widely held notion among Republican activists that “DemocRATS” don’t win elections unless they cheat. Rather than rely on evidence for this view, they hold it as a matter of faith. They proceed to claim it’s just a sensible requirement, thus avoiding the need think clearly about the notion.

The auditor’s report does not advocate or condemn voter ID laws. Auditors knew they had to avoid that policy debate. Instead it explains the stories of the other two states and recommends some minimum standards for Iowa in case the legislature agrees to erect this new blockade. They include “a significant financial investment” in voter education for the indefinite future, money for free ID cards, money to defend the law against a likely court challenge, and money for improving the technology that links databases of registered voters and licensed drivers. That’s four new lines of expenditure, estimated to exceed two million dollars a year in the report.

But since the report was written, Secretary Schultz has reduced funding for Iowa’s innovative poll worker technology tool known as Precinct Atlas. Counties who use the optional device must divide up the $30,000 cost formerly paid by the state.

Secretary Schultz says his new ID plan will make elections “secure.” County auditors who used the Precinct Atlas made the same claim for it. Security is in the eye of the beholder.

cross-posted at Bleeding Heartland.

The Iowa Secretary of State is fixing to scare off a group of criminals who must be insanely smart. These folks commit their crimes in front of numerous witnesses. They always offer a handwriting sample first. They never get caught. They are so sly, people never even know the crime occurred.

They are Iowa’s fraudulent voters.

Deputy of Elections Mary Mosiman was on the radio Monday warning about this crime. She was pinch-hitting for Secretary Schultz, who yanked himself at the very last moment. Was Schultz too embarrassed to finger these elusive voters with Mosiman’s evidence? Listen to her case:

“If they did want to commit fraud, they could go in as somebody else, they could vote. They would be long gone before anybody knew about it, assuming that person that was really the voter did not come in. We still wouldn’t know because when that actual person came in, the person who committed the fraud so to speak would be gone.”

Yes, unlike dumb criminals, these people leave the scene after they commit their crimes. When asked for actual instances of this crime Mosiman repeated herself:

“Personally, I can say, that if it did occur, we would never know because the person who committed that crime is long gone. Have there been any instances that have been caught and prosecuted? None that I am aware of.”

In other words, “It never happens.” If it had, the Deputy of Elections would be able to cite places and dates rather than baseless fears.

Just consider the risks these criminals take:

*They cannot impersonate a deceased voter because those names are regularly removed from the rolls.

*They cannot impersonate an inactive voter, because inactive voters already must show an ID.

*They cannot impersonate someone who has already voted, because that is a dead giveaway!

*They cannot impersonate someone who shows up later because their signature forgery would be strong evidence against them. (Plus the number of times it has happened would become known by the number of alleged forgeries. So far that number is at zero, even according to Mosiman.)

They must impersonate an active voter who does not actually show up later to vote. It must be one who would not be recognized by any poll worker or poll watcher. See how smart these criminals are! How do they do it?

Never mind that question. Secretary Schultz wants an ID law!

The Iowa county auditors saw this coming in November when Schultz rode the wave into office. They formed a study group and prepared to write a report. They even visited other states to hear in person from other election officials who also contend with these smart criminal voters.

Never mind that report. House Republicans wrote a voter ID bill and passed it without waiting for the auditors to report. Damn the facts, full speed ahead.

The bill was so bad the auditors voted to oppose it.

On the radio Mosiman admitted that she had once advised Schultz the ID cards were not needed. Now she covers for him, saying she is “hearing” new talk without saying if was factual, fanciful, or irrational talk.

Even if those these criminals are so smart that they always escape—so smart that we aren’t even sure they exist—in another way they are insane. Consider this:

. . .why would any sane person risk going to prison to influence an election by one vote? It is all the more implausible to imagine an army of impersonators coordinating their efforts on a scale that could affect an election, let alone doing so without being detected. That is why the election fraud that’s actually been tried involves ballot-box stuffing or bulk submitting of absentee ballots—schemes that allow a few people to roll up a lot of fraudulent votes. A photo-ID requirement does nothing to prevent those real shenanigans

So what is really going on here? Do Schultz and his Republican allies really fear these imaginary criminals? Or do they see a way to shrink the electorate? Could they maybe shrink it enough someday to get back to just letting white property owners vote? Maybe so.

cross-posted at Bleeding Heartland.

The new Republican Secretary of State in Indiana has been indicted for voter fraud. His fraudulent voting behavior was not prevented by the state’s photo ID law. By the way, here’s his photo ID now:

Actually I don’t know if he showed his ID card when he voted, but it is required by Indiana law.

Secretary White simply did not live where his vote was cast. But he needed to appear to live there because he was getting paid to represent his old neighborhood on the city council!

Now that this fraud has apparently been perpetrated on the Republican Party of Indiana (it happened in the primary election), what does the man’s attorney have to say about it?

“I’m confident that this doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal offense. … He had kind of a chaotic personal living situation at the time.”

Money may be the mother’s milk of politics, but double standards are the sine qua non. . . . . .also posted at BleedingHeartland.

Iowa’s county election officials (the county auditors) oppose a bill that has already passed the Iowa House. The bill would require voters to show a photo ID before voting. Absentee voters would have to photocopy their ID and mail it in with the ballot (Think for a moment how that would help the auditor know if the person in the photo matches the person who mailed the ballot).

Republicans dominate both the House and the auditors group. The sixty House Republicans voted unanimously for the bill three weeks ago. According to the Register, not a single auditor endorses it. Meeting last week, the Iowa auditors decided to register their group in opposition to the bill.

Secretary Schultz said the bill, HF 95, should be passed to prevent people from impersonating someone else at the poll. Auditors said they had never heard of such a thing happening.

This is the second time the group has rebuked the new Secretary of State. Last summer a large faction of the auditors endorsed Schultz’s opponent, an unusual step for these generally tight-lipped officials. Even Schultz’s home county auditor, Republican Marilyn Jo Drake, endorsed the incumbent Mike Mauro.

Other groups that have registered against the bill include the ACLU, AARP, the Governor’s Developmental Disabilities Council, the Methodist Church, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. Backing the bill are the Farm Bureau, the Iowa Minutemen, and the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition.

also posted at Bleeding Heartland.

One state representative wants you to worry about $3 gifts being given to him. While you are following that distraction, his majority leader can collect $1000 or more from utility companies, corn growers and car dealers. Those “campaign contributions” came in after the election.

Which will matter more? The $3 trinkets Koester points to, or the big bucks he ignores? And to think he says, “There is a climate where public trust of elected officials is on a decline . . .”

Is he curing the decline or causing it?

The dean of the UI Law School voted in Kansas???

She told the Iowa City Press-Citizen that she was not registered in Iowa. She lamented the defeat of the Iowa Supreme Court justices and says lawyers should have educated the public about an independent judiciary. Obviously they also should have educated their dean about our same-day voter registration.

Dean Gail Agrawal moved to Iowa in mid-summer. She is not working in politics, so she doesn’t have State Representative Hanusa’s lame excuse for voting in Iowa while living in Virginia.

Even a law school dean who is not familiar with Iowa’s same day registration should know in the summer that elections are coming. And that she is not in Kansas any more. She can’t even pretend she marked only the Presidential race on the ballot.

Governor Branstad took his first step to shrink the size of the electorate Friday. He revoked Tom Vilsack’s magnanimous order of July 4, 2005, which allowed sinners to vote after the completion of their sentences. Branstad says sentences, schmentences, pay court costs, too!

This news appears in the press but is absent from the Governor’s website. Nothing to be proud of, I guess.

Incoming SoS Shultz said today that some votes are sacred but others are subject to compromise:

“Provisions are set forth in our laws for any convicted offender to obtain their right to vote. I strongly believe that these provisions need to be adhered to now and in the future. This will send a message to Iowa’s voters that their voting privilege is sacred and will not be compromised in any way.

Shultz can’t ban felons from voting but he can hope Terry Branstad restores the red tape barriers that once plagued thousands of people. In this case Republicans favor more government regulations. Imagine that.

He hints here that his vote is “compromised” if a felon votes too easily. It will soon be said that it is also compromised if you vote without your identification card in hand, or if you register to vote on election day, or on caucus night. To Republicans this is all known as voter fraud. They intend to stop it in the name of “We, the People.”