Iowa Voters

Candidate Terry Branstad promised to make it harder for some people to vote. He wants to turn back the clock, reversing a national trend of thirteen years.

In the early days of the USA only property owners could vote. A hundred years later all barriers to voting were gone except the one that kept women away from the polls. Then new barriers were built against Blacks and felons, notably poll taxes and other tests that were unfairly applied.

“By the way, what’s the big word?”

Branstad thinks it terrible that everyone might be able to vote: “All of the sudden you’re just going to make 50,000 people eligible to vote,” he fretted. Imagine that!

Branstad wants to get their money first: “We helped the clerk of courts offices collect a lot of money” by wringing court costs out of them.

We already are famous for putting blacks in prison in Iowa at thirteen times the rate of whites. We are the second worst in the nation by some charts.

Stopping felons from voting is the new way to keep blacks out of power, says Michelle Alexander:

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
—FROM THE NEW JIM CROW

With all the talk of “We the People” ringing in our ears, let’s be sure we count every opinion and every vote. Don’t go back to building barriers, Mr. Branstad.

Before the November election officials in Columbia County New York agreed: they would hand count every race and thus audit their new paper ballot scanners. Six weeks after the election the results had been verified and the county was crowing:

This year, the first in which every single vote was cast on a paper ballot, Columbia County hand-counted each and every one. Before the election, Commissioner Jason Nastke and I ordered a full hand count so that our county’s voters could have complete confidence in the vote totals that we’d certify after the election. Who could distrust hand counts that are done by teams of Democrats and Republicans, with one looking over the shoulder of the other every step of the way?

Columbia is the only county that did this, though.

First they did it the fast way with the scanners. Then they did it the old-fashioned way with their own eyes. Other New York counties pretended to “audit” their races by looking at one or two machines, a process scorned by statisticians.

Meanwhile Iowa has no audits whatsoever after the election. State Representative Mary Gaskill got an audit bill through the Iowa House in 2008 but the state senate sat on it. Maybe Secretary Schultz can revive it. After all, he hails from the Iowa county with the most egregious election results in recent memory–proof that audits are needed. And his state senator is the key obstacle to Gaskill’s audit bill.

The Iowa constitution says

Judges shall serve for one year after appointment and until the first day of January following the next judicial election after the expiration of such year. They shall at such judicial election stand for retention in office on a separate ballot which shall submit to the question of whether such judge shall be retained in office . . .”

What does that mean?

Surely it doesn’t mean a separate piece of paper for every judge who must be retained. I think we would have been drowned in separate ballots in November.

Maybe it means one extra ballot with all the judges on it. But the wording conflicts with that because “judge” is singular. The ballot is for a single judge.

Or maybe it means each judge is to be voted on separately rather than with other judges who are also up for retention.

Back when the retention elections began in the 1960’s we didn’t have paper ballots. We had lever machines! Surely the authors of the amendment would have protested if they saw judges occupying lever slots on the same machine as every other candidate. Did they protest? Did they demand separate paper ballots?

Don’t be ridiculous. “Separate ballot” means a separate vote for each judge. It is a rule designed to deter Governor’s from appointing cronies and to sort out incompetent judges, not to dictate ballot style.

Michael Mauro was a good Secretary of State. He was always interested in our elections. He failed to win his own re-election.

Before Mauro our Secretary was Chet Culver. Culver used his time to become well-known around the state, saying “get out and vote” at every opportunity. The publicity this created was for him as much as for the elections he advertised. Who could be against voting? He used his name recognition to run for Governor.

But Culver left a mess in the elections department. He failed to stop dozens of counties from adopting paperless touchscreen voting machines, ignoring experts who warned against them. Some counties had two entirely different systems in each polling place–a touchscreen plus a paper system as well.

Having been a county auditor himself in Iowa’s largest county, Mauro came to the state job with experience and credibility. He dumped the touchscreens soon after his 2006 election. He later created a system for sending ballots overseas that was named best in the USA. He was so respected by Iowa’s county auditors that many of them took the unusual step of endorsing his re-election.

Four years in a low profile job is not enough to gain name recognition. Yesterday Iowa’s conservative voters kept all the incumbents they recognized except one (Governor Culver). They also passed over the guy they didn’t recognize (Mike Mauro). I’m sure they meant no ill will. Thank you, Michael Mauro.
cross posted at BleedingHeartland.

Last week a story surfaced that seven Iowa counties supposedly had more registered voters than adult citizens. The story was advanced by a devious blogger and became state-wide news. Let’s take a look at his devious ways.

1. He pretended to be more than one person, calling himself a “law center” when in fact he is a lawyer-blogger whose blog is called ElectionLawCenter.com. This deviation from the facts managed to fool Iowa Secretary of State candidate Matt Schultz who yesterday told a radio audience the blogger was a non-partisan watchdog group.

2. His letter to Iowa’s Secretary of State Michael Mauro would find its way onto the website of Mauro’s opponent Schultz, but he never called the Secretary to investigate before he threatened to sue, according to Mauro’s election director Sarah Reisetter.

3. He used the Republican Noise Machine to push the story. It was picked up by the Washington Times, Michelle Malkin, TheIowaRepublican.com and and he put it on his other blog at pajamas media. Eventually Iowa media took the bait. Bingo!

4. His accusatory letter had no numbers included so the public could not evaluate his threat. This allowed Matt Schultz to pimp the story while carefully noting that he could not know if it was actually worrisome or even true.

5. When confronted with real numbers by this post, he alleged that some of the adults should not count because they may be non-citizens. He avoided admitting that the rural county in question is only .2% foreign born. That’s two people for every thousand. And no doubt some (all?) of them eventually became citizens.

6. Finally he admitted he has no ability to sue since he doesn’t live in any of the states he threatened. Someone else will have to use his non-numbers to buttress their own court case. Fat chance in Iowa.

The blogger (J. Christian Adams) never discussed the real reasons that there might be more voters on the list than there are on the census website. Let us count the reasons:

A: The voter rolls are names of certain people. The census figures are estimates of county totals. The census bureau can detect a falling population, but it cannot know which people have left town. The county cannot remove names until it knows which names to drop.

B: My college son lives in Ames, according to the census. He votes here, according to the voter rolls. Same for some soldiers on a military base. This confuses Schultz and Adams. Pretty ironic given that Schultz’s brother is in college in another state. Will he vote for Matt? If so, he will have become part of this phenomenon.

C: When stable rural counties have a high rate of voter registration, there is no wiggle room for declining population. People move away and leave no forwarding address. They don’t register to vote elsewhere until a provocative election comes around again. Their names are still on the voting list, but the census believes that some of them are no longer here.

It is devious and disreputable to compare a list of particular people to an estimate of population. There are laws that protect your voter registration until you change it yourself. Adams and Schultz mock those laws in pursuit of a new law that would stop you from voting if your driver’s license has expired.

Their gambit was successful. They delivered propaganda in the form of news. They will convince many people who barely follow the story. Then they will claim public opinion favors their goals even though no facts support their case.

Candidate Matt Schultz went on the radio yesterday to push his “number one issue”—requiring photo identification of all voters. In the process he showed how little he knows about election laws and covered up his discomfort by laughing his way through the ten minute interview.

Schultz portrayed the accusatory electionlawcenter.com as a “non-partisan group.” In fact it is a blog run by a highly partisan attorney. If you try to find the so-called center with a Google search, all you can find is the blog. Schultz should know this by now.

Then he acknowledged that no actual numbers were provided in the letter threatening to sue Iowa for incorrect numbers. He admitted that the charges are unproven. Nevertheless he still features the letter at his website and he wants to use the story to push his agenda. That is indeed the real purpose of the story in the first place–to scare us into erecting barriers to voting.

Schultz joked about dead people voting or about people moving here from Chicago to impersonate dead Iowans at the polls. Since this canard is not grounded in any facts, he offered no facts to back it up. If he ever checked the voting rolls for dead Iowans, he could see that their names are removed as part of routine list maintenance. If he had paid attention last week to Secretary Mauro’s rebuttal, Schultz would even know the number of deceased removed in each county.

He further alleged that poll workers are powerless to stop an unfamiliar voter from impersonating the dead. He’s never actually read the law: Iowa Code 49.77 (3)

A precinct election official may require of the voter
unknown to the official, identification in the form prescribed by the state commissioner by rule. If identification is established to the satisfaction of the precinct election officials, the person may then be allowed to vote.

In a few minutes on the radio Schultz and his interviewer managed to mention aliens, Arizona, cheating, felons, dead voters, and Chicago politics while pretending to be average citizens bewildered by the ways of election administration. I’d say that makes him a poor candidate for Secretary of State.

Still, you got to hand it to him. When you are not constrained by any facts, a few minutes on statewide radio is all you need to plant doubts in the minds of the public. He was wildly successful at that.

A Republican partisan is trying to make Iowa look bad. He is threatening to sue us over our voter registration rolls.

It’s not news when a blogger threatens to sue a state official, so he calls his blog “Election Law Center.” This isn’t your average blogger, since he is a lawyer, but he’s still just a partisan hack trying to gin up fears of dead people voting or of aliens behind the curtain canceling out your vote.

Naturally this attack is featured on the website of the Republican candidate for Secretary of State Matt Schultz. What else has he got to offer us? Probably nothing. Last spring he was the only one of the several Republicans running for this nomination who did not answer questions I sent about the auditing of voting machine results.

Now he aligns with that blogger who says several Iowa counties have listed more voters than there are adults in the county. He can’t know how many people live there since census figures are nearly ten years old. Other figures on population do exist, but Republicans always say they are not reliable. They oppose using those figures in lieu of the census when drawing up legislative districts. Since those figures can make it look like there are phantom voters, then it’s OK to use the data.

How could there possibly be more voters than citizens? For one thing, there are always people like the 2006 Republican candidate for Secretary of State, Mary Ann Hanusa. She lived in the Washington, D.C. area for years while voting in Iowa elections. I scolded her at the time. I wonder if she has an opinion on this lawsuit threat. She is running for the Iowa House this year.

Iowa counties send their voting lists to a private vendor who checks with the post office for address changes. If a voter has moved, she may wind up on the list of inactive voters. Inactive voters must prove their residence if they actually show up to vote.

In the letter threatening a lawsuit no distinction is made between active voters and inactive voters. The blogger, J. Christian Adams, merely says seven counties “have more registered voters than citizens of voting age.”

Let’s look at one of them: Adams County, the state’s smallest county and not named after the blogger. It’s 2000 census showed 4482 residents with 76.1% of them old enough to vote. That’s 3410 citizens old enough to vote. Last month the voting rolls showed 3260 voters of which 106 were inactive and probably living in Omaha or Kansas City. So far the county looks clean.

But this Census Bureau site says the county had a 2009 population of only 3930 with 78.1% of them old enough to vote. That means 3069 potential voters. Bingo! Adams claims 3260 (3154 active) voters! Obviously some of them are getting set to vote from the grave!

Perhaps the partisan doesn’t know that in Iowa it’s not so much that voters die off. It’s that children move away. The population shrinks faster than the voting rolls.

Since the blogger didn’t use any actual numbers in his certified letter threatening Mauro, we may never know the basis for his claim. Mauro has already denied Adams County has the alleged problem. I left a comment at the blogger’s website and have written the Republican candidate for Secretary of State who has featured this story on his website. I also wrote to all seven counties (Adams, Audubon, Chickasaw, Fremont, Jefferson, Kossuth, and Lyon) to get their side of the story. I’ll let you know what they say.

The Iowa Democratic Party lives and dies by its absentee ballot campaign. Iowans had best take notice of the latest absentee ballot investigation in New York. Politicians are being investigated for filing phony applications for absentee ballots and using them to win an election.

The story is here.

The 2002 Help America Vote Act sent $30 million to Iowa for new voting equipment, training, and voter education. Now a federal audit at the Election Assistance Commission says less than 2% of the money was not spent according to Hoyle. Iowa must reimburse itself this money–some $575,000 by the end of this year.

But the real scandal was the money that was “properly” spent on touchscreen voting machines that have since been scrapped. If anyone wants to criticize then SoS Chet Culver, it should be for that foolish purchase, taken when the flaws of paperless voting were well known and public skepticism was running high.

But no, that scandal is forgotten. Even the federal Election Assistance Commission, which is looking over Culver’s shoulder in this audit, would never admit that touchscreens were folly. Many states still use them.

This is a trivial scandal compared to the Iowa film tax credits or to most audit scandals you read of. The original audit charges were that nearly ten percent of the money had been misspent, but the EAC has now vindicated the Iowa SoS and has dropped the majority of the charges.

The remaining complaints don’t show that the public was cheated so much as they show Culver failed to follow some rules. He failed to get a competitive bid before hiring a consultant to conduct public meetings and otherwise help prepare the HAVA plan for Iowa. He allowed a voter education project to cover too many topics, some of which are now said to be not educational. He spent some money celebrating the Voting Rights Act and on Get Out the Vote radio ads that should not have been paid with HAVA money.

So now Iowa must pay this money back to the Iowa HAVA account at the Secretary of State’s Office. You see, the expenditures may have all been legitimate–it’s just that they weren’t in line with the HAVA rules for using federal money. It’s not clear which other Iowa source of funds will be tapped for this money. No money goes back to Washington, D.C.

That’s it! No one claims the consultant (Iowa Public Policy Group) did a poor job. Their contract is more than three quarters of the money at issue. This could indeed be favoritism of some sort on Culver’s behalf, so let’s wait to see if anyone makes that claim. I’m not very sympathetic when competitive bidding rules are ignored. Shame on Culver. Had there been a competitive contract, maybe we would have saved a few bucks.

We still would have had touchscreens at the end of it. That’s the real scandal.

The Attorney General of Michigan has ruled that voted paper ballots can be obtained by the public under Michigan freedom of information laws.

A person must be allowed to inspect or examine voted ballots, which are not traceable to the individual voter, and to receive copies of the ballots upon request subject to reasonable restrictions prescribed by the Secretary of State. The public body may charge a fee for the copying of the voted ballots . . . .

The ballots cannot be so accessed until 30 days after the election has been certified. By that time all recounts will have been finished. Only people who want to audit voting machines as a routine practice are likely to be interested in exercising this right. Such an inspection would not overturn the results of a race even if problems were found with the official tally of votes.

The Code of Iowa lists many documents that are exempt from Iowa’s freedom of information statute, but ballots are not mentioned at all. Four years ago the mis-managed voting machines in Pottawattamie County led to a FOIA request, but no ballots were requested. The chance that you may win the right to inspect old ballots still in the hands of your county auditor has just gone up, thanks to the Michigan ruling.

hat tip/Jan BenDor

Three of the four candidates for Secretary of State have replied to my query about voting machine audits. None had much to say.

Even incumbent Michael Mauro managed only two sentences. Mauro said, “I do not believe anyone is against audits. What needs to be agreed on is the procedure for doing the audit.”

But the bill that died in the legislature this spring was hardly onerous. If everyone is for audits, they should have been able to accept that bill as a starting point. Maybe they mean something different by the term “audits” and that’s why they can’t agree. I had expected a more complete answer from Mauro.

Republican George Eichhorn managed a ten sentence answer, but only one sentence was about audits: “The statistical sampling of votes after elections is a prudent safeguard
that should be established in Iowa.” I’m encouraged that he mentions “statistical” as a standard, a better goal than random sampling that has no statistical thinking involved. If we are going to do any auditing, we might as well get our money’s worth by doing an audit with statistical significance.

Eichhorn also recognized that email voting will be a new problem, so that was more good news about him.

Republican Chris Sanger sent the most expansive email reply, but not the most pertinent. The closest he came to showing he understood the need for audits was in his first words: “I am Pro-Audit. We need transparency in our voting system; it is something the People want and deserve.”

Sanger seems more concerned with voters pretending to be someone they are not, or ambitious voters who try to vote in numerous precincts than he is with the votes that are actually cast. These are truly imaginary problems in Iowa.

Finally there is that Republican from Council Bluffs. He did not respond at all. Earlier this year he did not respond to a previous voting machine question I sent to his website. He may remain nameless here.

In short, the candidates do not share the urgency of the statisticians who called for “audits with teeth.” The replies from the candidates are all pretty toothless.

Read the rest of this entry »

Computer scientists have been joined by statisticians. They both know that computerized ballot counts should not be taken at face value. Someone besides the computer programmer must know what the ballots really said. Someone must grab a pile and look them over, comparing a hand count to the official machine count.

The American Statistical Association on Monday called for audit “laws with teeth.”

Iowa has no audit law at all. The Iowa House passed an audit bill in 2009 but the Senate ignored it this session so it died. One know-it-all Senator said the law was a solution in search of a problem.

I wonder what the candidates for Secretary of State think. All four of them will soon receive an email from me asking their view.

New Yorkers are slowly losing the last fight in the nation against “computerized vote-switching devices.”

Don’t you love that term? I first heard it from a couple of longtime activists .

In this eloquent post New York engineer Howard Stanislevic explains that we could use the term ‘voting machines’ for the old lever machines, but it’s better to call the new gadgets either Von Neumann machines (stored-program computers), or merely ‘vote-switching machines’ if we want to emphasize their risks. And he’s not talking about touch screens which have been chased out of Iowa. He’s talking about the stuff we still use right here in River City.

It seems they had a Pottawattamie moment in NY earlier this year. The scanner was programmed wrong so that votes for one guy were seen as the same as votes for another guy. Election officials are supposed to test their gadgets and find these errors. New York did so and found the error. But they ignored it, misreading their own test results. After the election they realized the returns could not be accurate. Too Late.

As Howard says, “Eternal vigilance would be easy compared to what will be required of us” now that we have to guard against computerized elections being miscounted out of our sight.

New York still uses mechanical lever voting machines such as Iowa once used. They are the only state still doing so. Attorney Andrea Novick and NY writer Ruth Wahtera each have blogs that make the case for levers over scanners. Novick has researched NY case law and believes that spot checks of ballots (known loosely as “audits”) after election night violate NY constitutional law. I’ve linked these blogs on the blogroll on the right side of this page, and here they are:
Re-Media Election Transparency Coalition

Save NY’s Lever Voting Machines

After reading some of Novick’s work I came to understand the Iowa law that seals up our ballots on election night and prohibits anyone from examining them until the day they are burned. New York has such a law. It is intended to prevent fraudulant recounts. New York assumed that once the ballots leave the polling place their custody is no longer secure and they can be altered or more can be stuffed into the box or some could fall out of the box, etc. So NO RECOUNTS are allowed in New York.

Of course this law assumed that the election night count was not made by concealed software which hardly anyone present could understand or verify. Perhaps Iowa law had assumed the same thing. Nowadays we have electronic vote counting by anonymous programmers. The election night count cannot be accepted at face value.

I’m getting nostalgic for lever machines. Plus I hear they last for 100 years.

This week a bill to randomly check on the electronic vote tally by actually looking at some ballots (ah–the audacity!) passed the Iowa House without dissent. But it’s already being stymied in the Senate, though no one is sure why. This paradoxically reverses the situation from four years ago when the Senate unanimously passed a paper trail bill only to see the House kill it without explanation.

Meanwhile the great state of Montana on Tuesday signed its audit bill into law. A picture of the Montana Secretary of State appeared in GovTech magazine as a result. Let’s tell Senate Democrats that Mike Mauro is just as good looking as Secretary McCulloch and also deserves to be featured in national publications.

cross-posted at BleedingHeartland.org