Paperless Plague Swept Iowa June 6
Update–error corrected below: Linn county DID reply to the survey.
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Iowa’s June 6 primary was plagued with paperless voting. According to a survey of Iowa auditors, at least 21% of the votes were cast on touchscreen terminals that left no voter verified paper trail.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the prognostications of the Iowa Secretary of State. Although Secretary Culver lobbied for the passage of a paper trail requirement in the legislature this winter, he was calm when the bill was waylaid by Representative Libby Jacobs and others in her party. We were supposed to be soothed by the fact that some 93% of polling places would nonetheless have paper ballots or paper trails.
But many counties have two voting machines. One leaves a trail and one is paperless. What would the voters actually do?
After the election the SoS had no idea what the voters actually did. Counties were not asked to report this information. Iowans for Voting Integrity did this work for you, surveying all counties that used two systems at the polls. Most surveyed counties–43 of the 59–responded.
If we tally just the reported touchscreen votes, we get 21% voting on vapor. This does not include some of the biggest counties, whose auditors–Mary Mosiman in Story county and Linda Langenburg in Linn county–did not report their figures despite repeated requests. IVI president Carole Simmons estimates the final figure at 25%
The problem of paperless votes is thus at least three times as big as Culver’s office acknowledges. Luckily for Iowa the only known ballot miscounting occurred in a county with 100% paper, so it got fixed.
Close call.