Iowa Voters

Mike Mauro, candidate for Iowa Secretary of State, “left some opening” for tougher ID requirements at the polls, according to a reporter with the Marshalltown Times-Republican. Reporter Ken Black wrote about Mauro’s appearance there Tuesday.

Mauro said such an ID card would have to be provided at no charge to the voter. But he said it was unnecessary to require ID cards because pollworkers can already card voters when they deem it advisable. Chapter 49.77 (3)

People worried about unauthorized voting should look beyond the very rare person who tries it at the polls. They should worry about the fraudster who knows computers better than the election workers do. He can cast many unauthorized votes and cover his trail better than anyone who foolishly signs in as someone he is not, or registers under false pretenses.

It’s not the voters, it’s the technology that ought to worry us. The fact that ID cards get discussed at campaign stops whereas voting machines do not also worries me.

The law school at New York University has studied paperless voting and electronic ballot counting and has CONDEMNED it, citing 120 ways to compromise elections! The school’s Brennan Center for Justice issued its report this week. It marks the third time this month that a well-established group has warned us against what Iowa election officials do to run elections. First came the LWV, then Common Cause, and now this one, the most impressive of the recent attacks on unaudited elections.

The Brennan Center assembled election officials, computer scientists, computer security experts, and members of the National Institute of Standards and Technology for a year long investigation. After discerning 120 ways to disrupt voting when electronic equipment is used, they named the easiest way: mess with the software, either before or after the machines are sold to the counties. It is the easiest because it takes only one person to pull it off.

It is even easier to do when the machines are set up for wireless communication, as they sometimes are.

But there is hope. The Brennan report (which is easy to read, I recommend it) says simple, cheap steps can go a long ways to mitigate the danger. Unfortunately hardly any jurisdiction takes all the steps and many jurisdictions have not implemented any of the safeguards.

First they say to use paper. Then they say to look at the paper by conducting random audits after the election.

Get rid of the wireless components in these voting machines, and have a plan of action when evidence of fraud or error appears.

Pottawattamie County showed how that last one works. Iowa also gets one recommendation right: Keep election administration de-centralized to frustrate fraudsters and dilute errors.

Two Iowans are cited in the Brennan study. Doug Jones of the U of Iowa is a familiar figure, one of the nation’s premier voting machine experts and a computer scientist. Patrick Gill, Woodbury county auditor, was one of the local officials surveyed by the Center.

Here is hard-hitting coverage that pins some blame on the new federal Election Assistance Commission, a group with its head in the sand. (Voting machines companies supply the sand.)

Just a year ago, with Culver, Blouin, and Fallon already in the race,Democratic state senator Michael Gronstal was contemplating a run for Governor. But it didn’t work out.

Instead Gronstal organized three quarters of the Democrats in the state legislature to join him in a simultaneous endorsement of Mike Blouin. But that didn’t work out either. Blouin came in second.

On June 17 Gronstal arrived at the Democratic party state convention, expecting to hear Chet Culver celebrate his victory, only to be greeted with picketers on the sidewalk carrying signs aimed right at him. (The signs concerned possible override of a vetoed bill on eminent domain.)

Senator Gronstal probably wasn’t feeling much appreciation as he sat with three other members of the Pottawattamie delegation in the mostly empty chairs before the convention began. It was then that I approached the group looking for assistance.

Wisconsin software tester John Washburn is planning a public documents request in his study of what went wrong in the Pottawattamie ballot counting on June 6. Washburn needs a helper in Council Bluffs to collect the documents and mail them to Wisconsin.

When I stated my request for such a courier, Gronstal promptly offered to do it. Great! A top legislative leader will soon have his hands on the documents that show what went wrong in his own county’s election. Maybe this will help us get verified voting in all Iowa counties.

If Gronstal can get that done, he’ll at least have my appreciation.

Iowa and 16 other states are at “high risk” of having a compromised election due to their use of paperless voting machines that cannot be audited, according to a report last week by Common Cause. I believe I’ve said the same thing myself!

None of Iowa’s neighbors made the high risk category. Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois were rated low risk, while Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota were called medium risk. Congratulations, Iowa!

Detailing what they call “the current voting machine debacle”, Common Cause lists the problems of the new systems and relates stories of their failures from Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Their recommendation? Get the votes put on paper! They call for federal laws, state laws, more money, retrofitting, decertification–whatever it takes to get voter-verified paper ballots into the system again for everyone. And then conduct public audits of the paper, if the ballots were counted by computerized machinery.

So Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have both spoken out strongly in the last month for verifiable voting. Earlier the same points were made by the Carter-Baker Commission, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Association for Computing Machinery. . . . Sheesh. Almost everyone but the people who run elections can see that the voting machines have no clothes.

Western Iowa’s Congressman Steve King has helped stall the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. King wants to remove a provision that requires ballots be prepared in other languages if more than 5% of the voters in the jurisdiction routinely speak the other language.

This probably doesn’t happen in his district. He says it is an unfunded mandate and a divisive practice that runs counter to the melting pot theory of American history. Eighty Representatives joined in King’s effort.

One must be a citizen to vote. And to become a citizen one must show proficiency in English. So why do any voters need non-English ballots? Judiciary chairman Sensenbrenner points out that anyone BORN in the USA is a citizen, even if born to non-citizen parents or Indian or Alaskan native parents who don’t speak English. He says most of the voters who don’t speak English were born here. So this is not a case of pandering to foreigners unwilling to learn the dominant language. It is a case of accommodating our citizens who have the freedom to speak whatever language they want.

Thus opponents of current hispanic immigration have joined old racists of the South to derail one of the proudest pieces of federal legislation—the bill that ended literacy tests and other roadblocks to voting. House Republicans never bring up a bill unless it is supported by more than 50% of the Republican members. That appears to be the bump in the once smoothly paved road to renewal of the VRA.

How bizarre! Two county recorders ousted by newcomers in two elections run on the same type of voting equipment on June 6?

Well, no. We know the Pottawattamie recorder actually won his election. The Pottawattamie people saw their mistake on election night. It affected every race on the ballot. It was easy to spot, perhaps because long shot Sal Mohammed was also getting lots of votes when he got so few in every other county.

The ballot scanners had been set up incorrectly.

But now Polk County’s recorder is claiming his defeat may be explained the same way. Why this claim took over two weeks to surface is only one of the mysteries here. Another is whether bad blood between the defeated (?) recorder and the county auditor may be affecting the call for a recount.

Luckily both counties had paper ballots to re-examine. Polk County auditor Mauro has always said it is foolish to run an election without paper ballots that would enable him to “re-create” the election.

Given a choice between the familiar paper ballots and the exotic vote-manipulating devices known as touchscreens, what did Iowa voters do on June 6? How many voted on paper and how many tapped their choices to the man (?) behind the Diebold screen and then left the polling place without knowing whether their vote had been recorded anywhere?

Soon we will know, thanks to the efforts of Iowan’s for Voting Integrity. They are asking 56 county auditors for the numbers of votes cast on paper as well as on the touchscreens. Those counties offered both voting systems in each precinct. Early responses indicate wide variation between counties, from a low of 13% voting the paperless way to a high of nearly 75%.

In the other counties voters have no choice. Some have all paper ballots while others have no paper ballots at the polls.

The Secretary of State does not collect this information. Unfortunately some auditors have balked at answering the survey.

According to this story in the Des Moines Register today, Democrat Mauro has the confidence of some Republicans in his race for Secretary of State.

by Sean Flaherty

If you live in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District (or for that matter, anywhere else) and you are concerned about election integrity, thank Congressman Leonard Boswell (contact information). Boswell became H.R. 550’s 191st co-sponsor last week (list of co-sponsors). H.R. 550, as is often said on this blog, is hands down the strongest election integrity bill yet proposed in the U.S. Congress.

Susan McAvoy, Rep. Boswell’s legislative director, said in a telephone call today that Boswell has watched with growing concern the voting problems across the country, and sees an urgent need for Congress to act to ensure that our election results are accurate. Another important fact: “It’s a bipartisan bill,” she said, and added that there is a realistic chance of it reaching the floor.

It is indeed bipartisan, with a cosponsor list that includes Republicans as diverse as Appropriations Committee power Frank Wolf of Virginia, Iowa’s moderate Jim Leach, and the very conservative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. The bill would govern federal elections only. It would require a voter-verified paper record of every vote and establish that the paper record would also serve as that official ballot in a recount. It would also require a hand audit of at least 2% of the precincts in the nation, including one precinct per county. Under 550, voting system software would have to be publicly disclosed and available for any citizen to review, and no conflicts of interest between voting machine companies and voting machine testing laboratories would be allowed.

The bill continues to build momentum, gaining 23 new co-sponsors in the last three months. It still needs more support, so if you live in Mr. King’s, Mr. Latham’s, or Mr. Nussle’s district, put the pressure on.

The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State has run a good many elections as Polk County auditor. He has developed one good habit that election protection activists want everyone to adopt: he audits his own ballot counting machines.

He has already begun work on his audit of the June 6 primary, he said Saturday at the Democrat’s state convention.

His practice is to wait until the official work is all done and the time for demanding recounts is past. During that time no one touches a thing. Only when it is clear that he can do no harm by running an in-house investigation. . . .only then does he say, “Let’s see how accurate our scanners were.” He selects a precinct at random and looks at the ballots the old fashioned way–with his eyes. He did not say if he makes any public announcement of his findings.

All counties do pre-election testing of their machines for accuracy. But Pottawattamie showed that such tests are often inadequate.

This sort of auditing is what auditors ought to do in every county. It is one of the goals of voting machine critics. It would be required by federal legislation that now has 191 co–sponsors.

Mauro already does it. Good for him. Is it done in any other county?

Hundreds of flyers were passed out today at the state conventions of Iowa’s biggest political parties. (Wasn’t it convenient that they met simultaneously only a few blocks apart!!) The flyers were from Iowans for Voting Integrity (IVI) and they mentioned this website at the very, very bottom. So maybe there’s even a new reader in the audience as a result.

The response was overwhelmingly receptive to the flyer’s message about the lack of security in paperless voting. One computer programmer said that it’s a no-brainer. But one–only one–delegate declared that she liked voting on the touchscreen toy and she was not interested in what computer scientists and programmers have to say when they warn against this folly.

Senator Harkin even brought up the issue in his speech to the Democratic convention. He condemned paperless voting, getting a rousing cheer. But he made a glitch of his own by saying voters should get TWO paper trails–one to deposit in the ballot box and one to take on home. A Harkin aide later acknowledged that such carry-out ballots were inadvisable. He said Harkin had been speaking off the cuff.

Five members of IVI pressed the Dem candidate for Secretary of State on the matter during a lengthy stand-up meeting in the lobby during the noon recess. Mauro is an aggressive conversationalist but he had nothing on the women from IVI, who bore down with point after point and several questions for Mauro, currently the election chief for Iowa’s largest county.

Mauro’s heart is in the right place on this issue. He stayed away from paperless voting machines and expresses amazement that any county would take the risk. But he does not give me the impression that he is studying this problem or keeping up with the news. There has been quite a bit of news since he became a candidate last summer. This issue demands some study from a would be Secretary of State, as any of the activists can attest. They are studying and they want the officials and the candidates to get up to speed, too. Maybe they motivated Mauro today.

Terersa Hommel says her remarks to the League were elemetary, but I say they are worth noting:

Our SARA resolution, which passed in our last national convention, was an important step at the time. My experience of the last two years, however, has driven home to me that “secure and accurate” cannot be determined without audits, but no Board of Elections is intending to audit. “Recountable” is inadequate because it only means we can recount, it doesn’t mean we will, and it doesn’t say that the recount has to constitute a meaningful, independent audit. You must know as well as I do that some vendors and jurisdictions have said that if they can reprint their tally sheets, this is a recount. I have no problem with accessible, other than that the whole concept appears to be used as much for political purposes as for assisting voters with disabilities.

Here is what SARA needs now:

Observable

If citizens are forced to “trust” anything other than observation, then an election lacks legitimacy and so does the government, whether or not irregularities occurred.

Voter-verified paper audit trails (”VVPAT”) were supposed to restore observableness to electronic elections by enabling voters to see their computer-printed paper ballot, and enabling Boards of Elections to do observable audits.

BUT, no Board of Elections in this country is intending to perform audits, whether or not they have VVPAT. I believe that one of the big reasons vendors and election people oppose VVPAT is because they don’t want to audit. Does this mean that they want to commit fraud without being detected? Or that vendors don’t want people to discover that their equipment doesn’t actually work? Or are they just thinking about convenience and forgetting what elections are for?

I believe that computers used in elections should be held to the same standards as computers used in the financial industry — voters must be encouraged to verify the voter-verified paper audit trail, and this paper record must be 100% counted, and all discrepancies between computer tallies and paper tallies must be investigated and reconciled, or else the election should not be certified.

Understandable

In three years of full-time activism I have met only a handful of election people who are savvy about computers. Even if most election people are honest, they are easily taken advantage of by vendors, lobbyists, and other interested parties including their own former colleagues who now work for vendors and lobbyists.

Manageable

Computer security is impossible to control. The FBI computer crime survey of 2005 said that 87% of companies were broken into, and 44% had intrusions from within their own organization. How do you think your local Board of Elections will stand up to these statistics?

If you want to rob a bank, where do you get a job? At the bank. If you want to steal elections, where do you get a job? At the Board of Elections. Or maybe you get your relative a job there. Few Boards of Elections in this country are dealing in a professional manner with the security problems of computers, because they lack the know-how, money, and political backing to do so.

One of the obstacles in our campaign for verifiable voting systems has been–sad to say–the League of Women Voters. That changed last weekend at their national convention in Minnesota.

The League is now on record supporting voter-verified paper and audits, to boot!

Here is a shortened version of the resolution:

Whereas:

Paperless electronic voting systems are not inherently secure, can malfunction, and do not provide a recountable audit trail,

Therefore be it resolved that:

The position on the Citizen’s Right to Vote be interpreted to affirm that LWVUS supports only voting systems that are designed so that:

a) they employ a voter-verifiable paper ballot or other paper record, said paper being the official record of the voter’s intent; and
…..

d) the paper ballot/record is used for audits and recounts; and

e) the vote totals can be verified by an independent hand count of the paper ballot/record; and

f) routine audits of the paper ballot/record in randomly selected precincts can be conducted in every election, and the results published by the jurisdiction.

The final push for this change of position was applied by Iowa’s own Professor Doug Jones along with Teresa Hommell ( Where’s the Paper) and Barb Simmons of the Association of Computing Machinery. Jones and Hommell are both linked in the sidebar of this blog every day.

Jones told the League that state and local election officials are in CYA mode (my term, not his), having spent public funds on defective voting equipment and fearing a loss of public confidence if they admit their folly. Besides that, the local officials can’t actually run their equipment without constant help from the vendor and they don’t want to offend the vendor by noting flaws in the system.

He says our only hope is to lean even harder on the government to reform. He suggested one way to do that: computer experts like him should go beyond mere criticism of the equipment and begin actually demonstrating the details of how to exploit the known security holes.

To which I say, “Bring it on.”

Pottawattamie county auditor Marilyn Jo Drake has been praised on a Wisconsin blog by software tester John Washburn.  Here’s some of what he had to say:

Congratulations to Marilyn Jo Drake

You may not have heard of Marilyn Jo Drake, yet. Marilyn Jo Drake is the County Auditor for Pottawatomie County, Iowa. In Wisconsin County Clerk would be the analogous title.

This last Tuesday (June 6, 2006), Marilyn Jo Drake decided an accurate election was more important than a convenient election. Marilyn Jo Drake had computer-generated numbers conveniently availble to her. Instead Ms. Drake report actual vote totals to the public in lieu of these computer-generated numbers which were masquerading as vote totals.

Making this right, but inconvenient descision has cost her much embarassment, time, and money.

She had to tell candidates and the press at 11:00 pm election night there would be no results that night. Candidates had to go to bed without knowing if they won or lost in the primary. Poor babies. . . . .

On her own authority she performed an audit of a precinct (the absentee ballots were effectively Precinct Zero) to determine if the voting machines were counting correctly.

She determined from this audit, the machine counts for Precinct Zero (the absentee ballots) were manifestly incorrect.

She then went public, immediately. . . .

She then executed an audit of the machine programing for the other 48 precincts of Pottawatomie County, Iowa.

As a result of the other 47 audits Marilyn Jo Drake now has vote totals for Potawatomie County, Iowa instead of convenient, computer-generated numbers masquerading as votes totals for Potawatomie County, Iowa.

Marilyn Jo Drake has a heroic character.

She accepted the uncomfortable truth over the pleasant, convenientand plausible lie. Her life would have been so much simplier today had she acceped the lie and stated Pottawatomie County, Iowa election were “problem free”. Instead, she chose accuracy over expediency.

I fear Marilyn Jo Drake may find she is one of only a hand full of election officials in the nation willing to choose this difficult option. But, I do know this, it may be a small club (3 so far), but being a member is worth it.

The original post is at washburnsworld.blogspot.com.

I missed all the excitement in the Iowa primary!  No, not the O’Brien upset of the annointed Dusk Terry, or the ousting of State Senator Tinsman, or the triumph of the unqualifed candidate for Secretary of State on the Republican ticket.

I’m talking about how Pottawattamie County is now a poster child for election integrity activists for what they did wrong and for what they did right when they realized the error.

They went wrong when they didn’t adequately test the voting machines before the election.  But they realized the problem as votes began to be counted Tuesday night and they grabbed the bull by its horns, wrestling it to the ground for a good ol’ rodeo victory over the voting machines—they counted the ballots by hand!

They knew something was wrong when the machine counting the ballots claimed that an unknown college student was ousting an long time incumbent county recorder.

Here’s a complete version of the story from John Gideon of Voter’s Unite.

We’ll be hearing more about this.