Vilsack’s Veto Threat
Governor Vilsack really did threaten to veto non-controversial legislation last spring unless it was accompanied by SF 351, a bill to require paper ballot trails behind magical computer voting machines. That confirmation came Tuesday from Dusky Terry, former policy aide to the Governor. Asked for Vilsack’s current views, Terry reminded me that he no longer works for Vilsack but said Vilsack “really believes in it [paper trails].”
Terry was in Spencer at a local trade show for farmers. He and all the other candidates for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture spoke to the large crowd of farmers and FFA students. I spoke to all five of them about paper ballots and gave them copies of Lynda’s leaflet.
Candidate Bill Northey was already familiar with the problem of paperless voting. Candidate Karey Claghorn said she knows several members of the Iowa House state government committee (who are currently strangling SF 351). I also had brief conversations with candidates Mark Leonard and Denise O’Brien.
Aside—Leonard dumped on Chet Culver for taking so long to certify Iowa’s election in 2004. I had forgotten that we waited several days for Iowa to be officially declared in the Bush column. But I prefer delay to error. It is this rush to immediate results that has softened up the public for computerized vote counting. We don’t really want instant results if they have to be undone later.
None of the five candidate encounters lasted more than two minutes, so it was hard to learn what they really thought. If we can get them interested, it should help enormously. Auditors may brush off pesky activists; they can hardly brush off candidates who wonder about the reliability of voting equipment. Those candidates are putting themselves and other people’s money on the line election day, and they want it to go smoothly. They deserve paper.