Iowa Voters

Candidate for Secretary of State Robert Dopf wants to address two aspects of elections that he sees as potential points of abuse. The first problem is absentee ballots. He sees them “spiraling out of control” as both parties use them to roll up their votes before election day. He fears fraud will eventually occur and he says this is the top election-related concern of federal prosecutors across the nation.

Dopf wants to return to the days when absentee ballots were for, um, absent voters–people on trips or unable to go to the polls for legitimate reasons. Currently Iowa has no restrictions on my ability to get an absentee ballot. He did not explain how he would enforce this if he got the law changed. What if my imaginery business trip is cancelled after I send back my completed absentee ballot? Who is to say whether my health keeps me from voting at the polls? Can we predict those November ice storms in time to decide if it is safe to walk into the polls? I agree with Dopf, but I wonder if we can really put this cat back into the bag. I hope he elaborates on this.

Dopf’s second issue is paperless voting machines. He said paperless voting machines have sneaked into our polls the way slot machines sneaked into our convenience stores. He quoted Iowa City’s Prof Jones regarding the need for voter verified paper ballots, and said he wanted SF 351 to be passed by the legislature. He also wants to see the source code for electronic voting machines and (I think) he endorsed federal legislation that would accomplish that goal. Dopf is looking at possible fraud here, too, as with absentee ballots. (He is not merely concerned with poor quality machines that sometimes lose votes and sometimes show more votes than voters. He hardly mentioned machine error rates, which are astonishingly high.)

Thirdly, Dopf criticized the way Governor Vilsack restored the right to vote for all Iowa felons last summer, saying it should have gone through the legislature. He said our previous system was working well enough, but did not say he would have opposed Vilsack if the Governor had gone through the legislature. In general Dopf apparently believes in restoring the voting rights of felons.

To see the whole WHO radio interview by Jan Mickelson, read the post below this one.

Since I don’t own a laptop, I won’t get many chances to “live blog” from meetings or polling places, so I will do it for this radio interview. Retired US Attorney Robert Dopf is about to go on WHO radio 1040 AM to discuss his candidacy for Secretary of State.

Dopf jumped into the Republican primary last week. Chuck Allison of Des Moines is already in the race, as is Democrat candidate Mike Mauro. Mauro is currently Polk County Auditor. Allison is a podiatrist.

I will post at each commercial break, putting each update below the previous one. Host Jan Mickelson will be “jm” and guest Robert Dopf will be “rd”. You can call the show. Here goes:

9:08 am:
Rd –I took early retirement last month from the US attorney’s office

jm– Don’t you miss prosecuting people? Give us some highlights from your job as US attorney

rd–I dealt with federal law. Many drug cases are interstate traffic and go to federal court. I did murder cases, economic crime, as well. I was in the Ottumwa case of Cathy Allen.

Jm–do we need the death penalty in Iowa?

Rd –not part of SoS job, but personal view is that “I do support the death penalty in certain narrow cases.”

Jm–tells Dopf he is a “disappointment” (and laughs) because Dopf wants to avoid trash talking about Democrats

Rd–Iowa has a long proud tradition of fair and honest election. I was federal prosecutor of election laws for Iowa. Elections with federal candidates on the ballot are federal concerns. The single greatest potential for fraud is absentee ballots, and they are spiraling upward.

Jm—parties are pushing absentee ballots, right?

Rd–yes it is like a nuclear arms race. Neither party wants to be left behind. Fraud is inevitable if this continues. SoS can help reign this in, and should take the lead at the legislature.

Jm—what changes do you want?

Rd—absentee ballots should be for people who will be out of town or cannot go to the polls But they are being used to try to get partisan advantage. Let’s take the process back to what it was originally intended and away from the ‘no excuse” ability to get an absentee ballot.

9: 20
Jm—Vilsack restored voting rights to former felons –what do you think about that?

Rd—this was a factor I weighed before getting in this race. I don’t oppose restoring right, I was surprised and shocked to see the action last year. It was shameful the way it was done—should have been done by the legislature.

Jm—-some legal beagles say it was outside the law to do this–you are an attorney–

rd —-I heard some valid points like that. Not so sure.

Jm —can another Governor revoke this order?

Rd—I believe succeeding Gov can reverse it but not retroactively. Old system was “functioning in an appropriate manner”.

Jan switches topic to voting machines abrubtly:

Jm—voting machines made error —mistake made by the machine–do you trust voting machine industry?

Rd–I’m glad you raised this issue. After absentee ballots this is my second issue. Computer scientists are documenting that these machines are vulnerable to manipulating.

jm –are you skeptical about paperless voting machines?

rd–should be a paper trail so there can be an audit

jm–why would we select machines that don’t have the attributes to produce . . . .

Rd—that is the question . . . .

Jm—well touchscreens have no dangling chads, so they were supposed to make the process idiot proof, but they haven’t . . .

Rd–experts need access to the source code , but mfg claim a proprietary interest in the source code. If 50% of the vote in 2008 goes on these machines …. Need federal legislation to get to source codes.

jm–why not go back to hand counted ballots? What is the worst that can happen?

Rd–I like seeing ballot scanners retained, but some handicap issues arose

jm–this is the tail wagging the dog. Stupid..

jm–you raised a stinging indictment of the machines a minute ago, Bob. Can you stay a little longer [to keep talking]?

9:40
Jm–now is the time to address security issues in voting. Bob gave us serious stuff about potential for abuse. 60 Minutes did a show once on Cincinnati voting scandal.

Rd–Iowa has a bill now SF 351 that would require a hard copy. It is imperative that we have that. I have been informed that bill is stuck in committee.

Jm–this doesn’t need to be debated –just passed. Debate should last 20 seconds. Now who will pay for this?

Rd–feds gave out $4 billion for voting machines.

Jm–has it been spent wisely?

Rd–haven’t followed that.

Jm–Iowa should pay for this.

Jm–how did this happen?

Rd–how did I wake up one morning and find slot machines at my local store??

Jm–we need to fix this.

Rd–quotes Prof Jones that current oversight is not adequate without voter verified paper copy.

Jm–switches topic to legal residents and valid voters: Does Ia have all the checks and balances we need?

Rd–no. We need to obtain an examination of all the facts. It is a legitimate question to ask.

9:52

Jm–thank you for your forthright stand on voting machines. You are the highest ranking person I have heard on this. You are not just some guy off the street. You are an attorney. You have given us a lot to think about.

Caller— says he knows Bob, wants listeners to know Bob has “highest integrity”. Will give Iowa honest elections.

Caller “Christian”:–immigrants can’t even register to vote so they are being checked already.

Jm–what is next in your campaign?

Rd–I didn’t decide to enter the race until the chance for early retirement from the US attorney’s office came along, so I am starting from scratch. I look forward to meeting Iowans.

Newly announced Republican candidate for Secretary of State Robert Dopf will be on WHO radio Thursday March 9 at 9:00 a. m. He may get to discuss his support for SF 351, the paper trail bill.

WHO broadcasts at 1040 on the AM band. Dopf will be a guest on the Jan Michelson show. Here is what he told one Iowan in an email today:

I will firmly address the DRE issue. I did call for passage of the Senate bill during last Friday’s announcement of my candidacy but the press didn’t report on it.

Additionally I will communicate my belief that this measure is
essential to maintaining the integrity of the voting process to Elgin and Jacobs as well as Speaker Rants.

He is referring to Cedar Rapids Representative Jeff Elgin and to West Des Moines Representative Libby Jacobs. Elgin chairs the House state government committee and Jacobs chairs one of its subcommittees. Together they control the fate of SF 351.

I’ll be listening to Dopf, so come back here to see what he says if you can’t listen.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and our Governor Vilsack may both run for President in 2008. Both are now trying to attract attention to themselves. Vilsack has his ten words campaign and Richardson has his paper ballot triumph.

Thursday Governor Richardson will sign a bill booting touchscreen and pushbutton voting machines from New Mexico. All the new voting machines sold since the Florida recount were supposed to reduce the number of overvotes and undervotes—cases where votes don’t get counted because voters mishandled the ballot or overlooked the race. The new equipment warns voters that they skipped races or that they voted for two candidates instead of just one. Voila! No more lost votes.

But New Mexico led the nation in undervotes in 2004 despite their electronic equipment. Paperless machines got the blame. “Eighty-nine precincts had more than 10% undervotes, and all but one of these used pushbutton machines.”

There were also some spectacular cases of phantom voting:

In one precinct in San Juan County 318 voters somehow managed to register 2,161 votes, 2,079 of them to incumbent county clerk Fran Hanhardt and just 82 for her opponent Glojean Todacheene. San Juan County was the first to announce its intention to clear the memory on their voting machines, initially disregarding the legal requirement of notifying all of the political parties involved in the election.

So now New Mexico will dump the suspicious equipment. And Governor Richardson is signing the bill at noon tomorrow. To get maximum attention, the ceremony will be on the web. You can watch it here at noon Iowa time:

www.billrichardson2006.com/reform/paperballots

Richardson’s grandstanding is needed to compensate for New Mexico’s disgraceful disregard of voters’ objections following the 2004 voting and for the state’s failure to investigate at the time. And it won’t get Richardson many votes in Vilsack’s back yard, but it will be noticed in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, where the voting machine story is much hotter than in Iowa. Let’s hope Vilsack tries to catch up with the new Richardson on this issue.

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.

It isn’t bad enough that ONLY TWO people want to be top election supervisor in Iowa. One of them isn’t even serious!

Republican Chuck Allison is running–or standing–for the job. He is a Des Moines podiatrist and holds a masters degree in history (yeah!) from UNI. He has a website. But that is about all he has.

Allison does not claim any experience in running elections. He does not seek any support from readers of his website. He does not list a way to contact him, and he has posted no news of his campaign for 75 days. He doesn’t mention support for voter verified paper ballots, either, so maybe none of this matters. If he doesn’t see the need for them, he might as well stay home anyway.

Allison’s lackluster campaign nonetheless “doesn’t expect any competition in seeking the Republican nomination.” Allison is a member of the Polk County Republican Central Committee, so he should have his ear to the ground regarding potential rivals. I can’t help but conclude the Republicans have decided to concede this race. Allison’s main job is to fill a hole in the ballot for his team while the real efforts go to the Governor’s race.

Any Republican’s out there who actually care about election administration in Iowa?

Why are there only two candidates for Iowa Secretary of State?

It’s an open seat. Ambitious, risk-averse politicians crave open seats. But they aren’t craving this one.

Here we have a state won by Gore in 2000 but by Bush in 2004. In both years there was talk of seeking a recount. In this state there are 610,000 active Republican voters and 602,000 active Democrats–-a virtual tie. In the Iowa State Senate there are 25 Republicans and 25 Democrats–-a literal tie.

Last year the Governor ignited a furor by easing the way for felons to get back their voting rights. The year before that the Secretary of State was criticized for merely sending a voter registration form to every postal address in Iowa. At this moment a critical election law bill requiring auditable paper trails lies stuck in a House committee even though it passed unanimously in the Senate and even though HAVA hearings around the state last year produced only one clear public demand—FOR PAPER TRAILS!!!

Despite all this controversy there is just one Democrat seeking the job of Secretary of State. There is just one Republican. And the Republican looks like a mere place holder.