Iowa Voters

Wendy Barth, Green Party candidate for Iowa governor, reports on her speech this weekend at the Iowa Farmers Union meeting, where candidate Culver also spoke. Chet must be feeling a bit above it all, judging by Barth’s spin on the event–

Chet Culver came in, shook everyone’s hands, went to the podium and gave his prepared speech, shook everyone’s hands again and left without answering any questions. He did, however, finally recognize that there are more than two candidates for governor, asking me (from the podium) for the correct tally. Why should I know that better than the Secretary of State? (the rumor is that there are 5 - Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian and Socialist Workers.)

Good point, Wendy. Culver should know who is running. They all registered at his office. Pretty condescending, if you ask me.

How cynical I am. I immediately jump to the conclusion that if Secretary of State and would be Governor Chet Culver is passing out leftover HAVA money just weeks before the election, it must have something to do with making him look good. And a nice contrast to opponent Jim Nussle, whose guidance of the House budget committee in Washington has dealt in deficits for the entirety of Nussle’s reign.

I wonder if this is the same money once dangled before auditors as possible payment for voting machine printers. Getting the printers would have been a point for Culver. But looking like a frugal administrator is probably worth two or three points.

Chet not stupid, indeed.

The woman who would be in charge of Iowa elections votes here but lives in another state. How cool is that!

Mary Ann Hanusa is a Council Bluffs native. She was named Monday by the Republican Party as its candidate for Secretary of State. She lives in Virginia.

News accounts have alleged that she votes in Iowa. She has worked at the White House for FIVE YEARS. I’d say that’s long enough to establish residence, unless she’s still commuting.

Why does she vote here? Elected Congressman have an excuse for living in DC while voting in their home state. Political wannabes who merely work in DC for years on end for whoever will hire them have no excuse for pretending to be Iowa residents.

It’s even covered in the Iowa code 48A.5(3):

3. If a person who meets the requirements set forth in subsection 2 moves to a new residence, either in Iowa or outside Iowa, and does not meet the voter requirements at the person’s new residence, the person may vote at the person’s former precinct in Iowa until the person meets the voter requirements of the person’s new residence. However, a person who has moved to a new residence and fails to register to vote at the person’s new residence after becoming eligible to do so shall not be entitled to vote at the person’s former precinct in Iowa.(emphasis added)

Looks to me like she is violating the laws she wants to be in charge of! Would that be the “voter fraud” we sometimes hear about from Republicans?

Republicans finally found a volunteer to run for Secretary of State. She is Council Bluffs native Mary Ann Hanusa, currently of Washington, D. C.

Hanusa has experience as a secretary, all right: She’s been drafting letters for President Bush for several years, pulling down $58.700. Before that she handled correspondence for Bush senior, and was later an aide to Senator Grassley.

So far no indication that she knows anything about election administration, voting machines, open source software, or election audits.

No, I don’t have any inside information about the Republican’s sending an S-O-S because they can’t find a candidate to run for Secretary of State. But how bad is this?

Council Bluffs businessman Jeff Ballenger said he is “pretty confident” he will not run as the Republican Party candidate for Iowa Secretary of State. . . .

A member of that committee contacted Ballenger a few days ago and expressed the committee’s confidence he could be a good candidate, Ballenger said.

Ballenger was a political unknown when he ran for Congress in 2002. He ended up third in a four-person race, finishing ahead of a longtime state lawmaker from Sioux City.

“They (the committee) said I had the energy and the ability to win the secretary of state race, and they seemed to think I still have name recognition,” Ballenger said.

Name recognition? Jeff Ballenger???? Who’s that?

Ballenger evidently saw through that flattery.

Republicans need a candidate for Iowa Secretary of State, the chief elections official in Iowa. Their “placeholder” candidate has dropped out after winning a contested primary. There must be some skeletons in his closet!!

The new candidate should . . .

A. Understand computers at least to the level of the old adage “Garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order. Computers can be programmed honestly, erroneously, maliciously, and surrepticiously. Hackers have caused trouble for the Department of Defense and for Microsoft. It is only a matter of time before they steal votes. Maybe they already have. This means any current county auditor who uses paperless voting equipment is disqualified for being too trusting.

B. Believe in auditing elections even if it means exposing his/her own errors. This means we need something worth auditing, namely a written ballot verified by the voter. Audits should be regular, widespread, and random.

C. Insist on public control of all aspects of the election. That includes the software that runs any computers and the maintenance of any hardware that the state or county uses to facilitate election administration. Control should not be in private hands, whether corporate hands, candidate hands, or criminal hands.

Those three steps will go far to make elections transparent. Now as for making them open, a good candidate will

D. Advocate for a new registration regime for poltical parties. Iowa law prohibits registration for any party except Republican or Democrat. The Green Party currently has a lawsuit pending with Secretary Culver on this matter.

E. Advocate for public funding for campaigns. We all know that “who ever pays the piper calls the tune.” The public should pay the campaign expenses so that we can call the tunes when the legislature convenes.

F. Advocate for instant runoff voting (IRV) in Iowa’s non-partisan races for mayor. Currently a second runoff election is ordered if a candidate fails to get a majority in the first round. This is expensive and needless. The IRV system can do it all at once.

Who can be this candidate?

You read it here first. In my first week of blogging I called Chuck Allison a “placeholder” in his weak bid to be Secretary of State. That was back in January.

Now he has quit the race, after having inexplicably defeated a qualified candidate (Robert Dopf) in the June primary. It”s pretty ironic that a man running to oversee the state’s elections would defraud the voters by pulling out of the race AFTER he has won a contested primary. I’m glad he won’t be overseeing our elections. Soon we’ll see just whose place he has been holding. The Republicans have until August 18 to slip in a new candidate.

Gasp! What would the Register’s gardeners think? Here’s a candidate who lost his election by a landslide but still challenged it. And he “won” a significant victory in doing so.

He won (a) more voting machines for underserved precincts, (b) better pollworker training, (c) better security after the ballots are cast, and even more stuff–basic stuff–that make me think they must have run a pretty sloppy election in that Indiana county.

Roses for him.

Thanks to John Gideon whose Daily Voting News service tipped me to this story, as it has to many other stories where he went unthanked.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Democratic Party candidate for Secretary of State Mike Mauro last week released his fundraising report, as did all Iowa candidates. Mauro claimed nearly $100,000 cash on hand. He has no primary opponent.

“Republicans Chuck Allison and Robert Dopf reported $8,044 and $7,206, respectively,” according to a report at IowaPolitics.com

Meanwhile Dopf is quoted in the Sioux City Journal on his campaign to reign in absentee voting. To that end he accused Chet Culver of not attending to the issue:

“Under eight years of Chet Culver, I heard a lot about getting out the vote,” Dopf said. “I never once heard anything about the security or integrity of the process.”

That is an overstatement. Culver has recently advocated for paper ballots as insurance against paperless computer voting. That is the main problem in election integrity these days.

Governor Vilsack has issued a challenge to the Secretary of State candidates throughout the nation. He wants them to take a VOTES pledge (everything has to have an acronym these days).

VOTES goes like this:

To restore public confidence that voting is a right not a privilege, I believe:

*VERIFIABLE:* Every vote cast must be counted by a system that is auditable with a verifiable paper trail.

*OBJECTIVE*: Every election official must conduct their
responsibilities openly and objectively to restore public confidence.

*TOUGH*: Every law to prevent voter intimidation and fraud must be vigorously enforced.

*EQUAL*: Every citizen must have equal access to locations, adequate machines and well-trained election judges.

*SECURE*: Every voting machine must be secured during all aspects of voting to protect the integrity of the count.

You can also sign on to this campaign at Vilsack’s Heartland PAC website here.

A recently announced Republican candidate for Iowa Secretary of State is urging the Iowa House of Representatives to pass a paper trail bill. Robert Dopf, a former federal prosecutor, is leaning on his own party to take immediate action, saying

“If you wouldn’t trust your money to a charity that refuses to perform an audit, why would you want to trust your vote to a system that has no independent means of verifying its accuracy?”

The bill supported by Dopf has already passed the state senate 48-0. It is being held hostage by Republicans in the House who could bring it out of committee at any time. If they don’t do so by Friday, the bill apparently falls victum to the “funnel” rules of the state legislature and will be dead for this session.

Here’s more of today’s press release from Dopf:

“If we are to maintain public confidence in the integrity and security of our voting processes it is imperative that we require that newly acquired electronic voting machines (DRE) have the ability to create a voter verified paper record for audit purposes,” Dopf said. “DRE machines currently being installed in 18 Iowa counties do not have this capability. Adoption of this security feature will help us avoid unwarranted challenges to the integrity of the voting process.”

The move to require a paper audit trail has been fueled in recent months by mounting evidence documenting the vulnerability of the DRE machines to malicious manipulations potentially altering the vote count.

“This is not a partisan issue. Every Iowan – Republican, Democrat or Independent – has a stake in ensuring we maintain a voting process in which we can have confidence,” Dopf. “And, we need a Secretary of State who is going to be focused on that issue every single day and capable of getting it done.”

That last sentence puts real pressure on the House Republicans. Dopf has reminded us that outgoing Secretary of State Chet Culver has been backing SF 351 but has not gotten it passed. Democrat Culver can claim to be the victum of the House Republicans, but Dopf is hinting he can get them to act. Let’s see if they snub him or make him look effective.