Iowa Voters

The Clinton Herald is lashing out at HAVA (The Help America Vote Act) for running up the county budget with new expenses for voting machines. But the Herald goes wrong on two counts.

The Herald blames Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver for the switch to new equipment in Clinton county–a switch away from computer machines to paper ballots.

Thanks to the federal Help America Vote Act, a response to the Florida mess of 2000, state election officials were charged with defining and enforcing election equipment standards. In Iowa, Secretary of State Chet Culver — now a candidate for governor — decided each county would need to own and operate optical scan equipment.

Mr. Culver did not require this decision. Moreover, it was a good decision. Although Culver argued that all Iowa voters should be able to see their votes appear on paper, he did not require paper ballots per se. He merely advocated that counties forcing their citizens to vote on black hole computers to also force the computers to print out the vote on a piece of paper so that the voter could have some confidence in the equipment.

That was a good idea. But it was even better that Clinton auditor decided to take the opportunity to move away from computers and toward the familiar paper ballot. He was printing thousands of them anyway for absentee voters. Unfortunately, Clinton will still have one paperless computer voting machine in each precinct. It will have special features to assist blind voters, but anyone can use it.

The Herald also lamented the jilted computers:

. . . we’re still stuck with a bunch of perfectly good voting machines that haven’t come close to being used long enough to offset their purchase price.

They may be like new, but “perfectly good” is never an appropriate description of computerized vote counting equipment when its operating system is a trade secret. Who is really counting your vote? Not Auditor Sheridan, unless he wrote the programming himself.

So the Herald has it all wrong and Auditor Sheridan has it mostly right.

Diebold is the manufacturer of the voting machines being installed in most Iowa counties. But their performance record is so bad that last month they were served with a class action lawsuit. So if you own Diebold stock, perhaps you can join the lawsuit. Tomorrow the plaintiff will file a new motion, and that event has prompted this story based on a press release from the plaintiff’s lawyer:

“The complaint alleges that defendants violated provisions of the United States securities laws, causing artificial inflation of the Company’s stock price. According to the complaint, during the Class Period, the Company lacked a credible state of internal controls and corporate compliance and remained unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products.”

Ooops. That bold face type is my fault. Must have pushed the wrong key or something. Since this lawsuit was filed, Diebold has said it is reconsidering its role in the voting machine business.

So the lawsuit stems from voting machines that are said to be of dubious quality. Those machines have been decertified in California and hacked in Florida. They were blamed in Ohio for the need to hold a new election last week when the votes didn’t add up correctly.

Why are investors suing over bad voting machines but counties are not suing? I suppose it is easier to show lost money in the stock market than to show lost confidence in elections. But the loss of confidence is the greater problem.

And why are counties still willing to use the Diebold machines that provide no paper record of the vote for the voter to verify? Ask your auditor.

One of the Iowa websites that links to this Iowa Voters blog thinks I ought to do this. I have had this Declaration of Independence on my “about” page, but that makes it a pretty timid declaration, since few people see it. So in case it matters to anyone, here it is:

Declaration of Independence
This website and this blog are not funded by any think tank, foundation or secret donors. It is not affiliated with nor does it receive money from any government agency, political party, candidate, PAC, or voting machine company. That is more than you can say for the Election Center.

To quote Spencer Tracy in that 1948 movie, “I paid for this microphone.”

So did I. I paid for this blog. It costs less than I expected.

I want to cover Iowa on this blog, but I can’t ignore developments elsewhere that may affect us. One diligent observer of the voting machine mess says this New Jersey story is a “huge” development.

Lawyers at Rutgers University allege that voting machines are being used in New Jersey despite those same machines being banned in other states. They assert that the voting machines are insecure and say their use may violate New Jersey’s state constitution. Their lawsuit was put back on the court calendar by a state appeals court after being tossed out by a lower court.

Ominously for Iowa, the suit complains that New Jersey does not check the software of electronic voting machines to determine whether they have been tampered with or whether they are faulty. Well, it is even worse in Iowa, as we saw on January 30. When Iowa certifies voting equipment they even alter the software in the middle of the test.

If a similar lawsuit can get any traction in Iowa, the state will be little more than a sitting duck.

You can find this story and other news from beyond Iowa at VoteTrustUSA

County auditors throughout Iowa have spent a pile of money for new voting machines that take the state deeper into the shadow of paperless voting. Seventy counties now will “record” at least part of their votes in a way that many voters distrust, on touchscreen computers with no paper printout for the voter to verify. See this map (pdf).

Before the Help America Vote Act provided all this money, only 15 counties used paperless computers.

This shadow grew despite a raging national controversy during the time these machines were being purchased. It happened because the auditors blocked SF 351, a bill requiring a paper ballot. It happened despite a call from the Secretary of State for the bill’s passage, a plea from voters at HAVA hearings last spring, and a joint letter from the Secretary and the Governor backing paper ballot trails. It happened despite independent reports from the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Carter-Baker Commission questioning computer security and recommending paper records.

Earlier this week VotetrustUSA.org offered us Iowans an easy-to-use email program for asking our state legislature to pass the bill we need, SF 351. Please take this action. Make the sun shine on Iowa’s ballots.

It’s Tuesday and that is election day. Both in Haiti and in Ohio. To this blogger, the Carlisle, Ohio voting is the more curious.

That’s because they already voted on this levy last November. But they made a mistake–-they held a paperless election.

Voters told the touch screen voting machines either YES or NO on a question of how to finance the fire and emergency service departments. At the end of the day, the box revealed the votes. But when the YES votes were added to the NO votes in one precinct, the total was greater than the number of voters who had participated in the election. Oooops.

Now a court has ordered a rerun of the election at city expense.

I wonder if the city will be getting in touch with Diebold, the makers of the voting machines that messed up the November election. And I wonder whether Iowa counties are prepared for this to happen to them. Ask your auditor about paperless voting.

A top officer for the Iowa Secretary of State (SOS) has emailed me a defense of the voting machine certification that occurred January 30. I reported on the meeting here and more specifically here. During the certification process a volunteer voter named Penelope had used an Automark ballot marking computer. With its help she had filled out a ballot that she was unable to see due to her visual impairment.

Sandy Steinbach, who represented the SOS at the meeting, notes that “The ballot was produced correctly, even though the device required re-booting after the anomaly occurred,” as I indicated in my story.

She goes on:

“The situation has been explained to me as the AutoMARK receiving information that it could not process. Because of this, it shut itself down.”

Of course the only information the machine receives is the voter’s choice of which candidates to mark, and processing those votes correctly is the machine’s only role on election day. I don’t think Penelope did anything malicious. She was merely trying out equipment she had never encountered before. And the ballot was indeed marked. But the machine froze in the process.

Steinbach continues:

“AutoMARK has a special role in the election process. This device does not count ballots; it marks them. The ballot will be counted by an optical scan counting device.

It is not unusual for state certification testing to raise concerns that were not seen in the ITA [independent testing authority] process. We are looking at the devices in a somewhat different way from the ITA process. The fact that the anomaly was discovered and is being corrected is a good thing. That is why we do the tests. We will prepare instructions for our election officials, so they can be prepared if this rare event happens on election day.”

Let’s hope it is a rare event. But in the January 30 test only a few ballots were created on the Automark machine. This rare event occurred on the very first ballot. The vendor’s representative acknowledged something similar had happened in Illinois tests. So is it really rare? Voters may have to find out for themselves.

Elections may be getting more expensive and the voting machines may be getting more complicated, but poll workers are not getting a raise in Clinton County.

County Auditor Sheridan reported to the board of supervisors that the cost of equipment, postage, supplies, and training, were putting a hole in his budget despite the $278,000 he received from the state to pay for the new equipment. So how much is left for the poor poll workers whose day can be 16 hours of uninterrupted vigilance?

Poll workers currently are paid $5.50 per hour, with the chairman at each location receiving $6.25.

The poll workers have asked for a pay raise, Sheridan said, but he told them not this year because of the expense of buying the new voting system. . . .

Well, there’s always next year.

I told them maybe next year we’ll look at it,” he said.

“If we could find the money, I wouldn’t be opposed to paying them a little more,” said [supervisor] Todtz. “They deserve it.”

Election directors often lament the difficulty in finding poll workers. No wonder. They start work before the poll opens at 7 am and stay until after it closes at 9 pm. That is probably 16 hours. They have to know how the equipment works and they may have to manhandle it from the courthouse to the poll, set it up and tear it down and haul it back. They have to know some election law. They are the front lines in provisional ballot skirmishes. They have to balance their books showing the number of voters and the number of ballots.

Some auditors worry that the new equipment is going to scare off many current poll workers. In some circles there is even talk of asking high school students to be poll workers. That may be a lesson in civics worth offering, but it is also a sign of desperation. Poll workers are the guardians of a pure ballot box and that is not a job for the immature.

So let’s invite high school students to be poll worker aides and let’s pay the poll workers like our democracy depended on them.

Rewriting software is not for beginners. But what if your ballot counter is misbehaving? Should you reprogram it? Even in the middle of a public certification meeting?

They did it Monday in the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Election Systems and Software of Omaha was there to gain official approval of its new equipment. But after they had used the new ballot marking gadget to mark some ballots for a test election, the ballot scanner made a mistake in the tally.

The scanner reads and counts those paper ballots at the speed of light. It can be quite reliable if the ballots are properly marked and the scanner is carefully calibrated and correctly programmed. But the scanner must know the rules for counting and that can be tricky.

Now this ballot scanner was not really being tested Monday, according to the folks in the room. It was indeed on the agenda, but it had also been tested and approved last year before the newest gadget for handicapped voters was for sale. Today it was needed to read and count the ballots created by the new gadget because the examiners wanted to see that those new ballots were actually decipherable by the M100 counter.

So it wasn’t the new gadget that was tripping up the older scanner, it was the programming in the scanner. Apparently this particular test ballot had not been tried during the earlier approval process. So now, what to do?

Phone home. The ES & S men called Omaha to see what could be done. It was decided to “burn new media,” thus reprogramming the scanner on the spot. The chair of the board of examiners observed “We’ve never had to do this before. We’ve never had to reprogram.”

About an hour later the technician stuck a memory card into the M100 and tried the small stack of ballots again. Success.

When I told software tester John Washburn about this by email later, he wrote back:

WHAT!! …REPROGRAMMED WHILE WE WAITED…!!

Calmer now. Pulse returning to normal.

Calm blue oceans.

Breathe in, Breathe out.

This stark response prompted me to ask another question: Were they tampering with already certified equipment when they reprogrammed the machine? He said, “Yes.”

What have we learned from this? We know the ballot scanner worked on Monday. It did what it was told by the software it was using. We know that you can’t really tell what is in the software. We know it is easily changed if the vote count is not going to your liking.

But we can also wonder a few things. Do election officials know what constitutes tampering with their equipment? Who do they trust to mess with the programming? Do some Iowa counties now have in their possession brand new equipment that is programmed to improperly count some ballots?

Just wondering.

You would have to be blind not to see that the Automark voting machine needs more work. Actually, it was a blind woman named Penelope who first saw it in Des Moines Monday. Or at least she discovered it. The people looking over her shoulder really did see it.

Penelope had come to the meeting of the Iowa Board of Examiners of Voting Machines to test the device being examined. It marks ballots for people who need help. It helps them while keeping their votes private. It enabled Penelope to use headphones to hear the ballot read to her and provided her with a button to push to mark her choices in every race on the ballot.

No one knows what Penelope did to upset the machine. She did not know anything was wrong because the machine gave her the marked ballot at the end of her testing. But the machine had also locked up and put an error message on the screen. There was no audio error message, Penelope said.

I was sitting where I could not see the screen. But we were all told that an “argument out of range exception error” had occurred. No one knew what that meant. The machine’s advocates called headquarters to find out. They reported that this had occurred before in Illinois’s testing, and a repair to the software was already being written in Omaha.

Not to worry. Penelope was happy. She said she would cease voting absentee and actually go to the polls in the future. She said it was “about time” provisions were being made for blind voters.

The board of examiners decided the machine could stand to be rebooted if this happened on election day. They focused on the fact that no damage had been done to Penelope’s ballot. They certified the machine. Several Iowa counties are planning to use it.

But I contacted John Washburn, a software tester with a decade of experience. He said such an error “is usually indicative of bad code being passed to an interpreter of some sort.”

Bad code? Already detected in testing in Illinois? If this stuff gets past the extensive federal testing we always hear about, how extensive can it be?

We are indeed lucky to have this problem appear on the device that marks paper ballots. But this same company has also sold computer voting terminals (with NO PAPER TRAIL) to seven Iowa counties. Did they use any bad code in those machines? Was Penelope present the day those machines were tested? Penelope—-HELP US!

The room was too small and the table was too crowded. The ballot marking machine locked up once and had to be rebooted. The ballot scanner got tripped up by a test ballot and had to be reprogrammed. The voting machine managers from ES & S were unable to answer some questions about their equipment. They spent a fair amount of time on the phone to HQ getting things worked out.

That was the scene Monday in the office of the Iowa Secretary of State. Election Systems and Software of Omaha had come to town to get state certification of a new piece of voting equipment. It is intended to make it easier for blind voters and others to cast private ballots.

More ballots were cast in Pocahontas, Iowa in 2004 than were used to test the equipment Monday. There was NO testing of security, even though security concerns were raised.

The three official examiners were underpaid for their time and woefully underpaid (Iowa Code 52.6) for the responsibility they shouldered. They had already announced their plans to purchase the equipment they were about to review. They had an obvious interest in running trouble free elections, but not much curiosity about implications of the errors they uncovered. They could have benefitted from outside expertise (Iowa Code 52.5), but the Secretary of State had not provided them with any.

Nevertheless at the end of the six hour session, the equipment was approved. No surprise here. Just another step in the implementation of the Help America Vote Act, a disaster as bad as the 2000 Florida recount that it was supposed to address.

They say you should never watch the making of sausage or the crafting of legislation. Add the certifying of voting machines to the list. And the next time someone tells you that voting machines are “tested and tested and tested,” send that person to me.