Lessons from the Pottawattamie Election!

The primary election last June 6 has come and gone, but it should not be forgotten. A problem that has marred elections across the United States came to Pottawattamie County, and offered our state an unforgettable lesson in the need for verifiable and auditable elections.

On election night, as county election workers watched absentee ballots tabulate, they noticed odd results in the race for County Recorder. John Sciortino, the popular incumbent of 23 years, was losing to a 19-year-old college student named Oscar Duran. Auditor Marilyn Jo Drake quickly suspected something amiss, and ordered a manual check of the paper ballots. Her suspicion proved correct: the ballot scanners had not been programmed to recognize that in different precincts the paper ballots rotated the candidates' positions. Ballot rotation is a measure commonly used to reduce the chance of voter fraud.

The faulty programming affected every multicandidate race on the ballot, and the County ordered a full hand recount of all races. Mr. Sciortino won his race for the renomination of his party, and a county board race was also reversed. The Pottawattamie election snafu was covered extensively in in the June 7 and June 8 issues of Council Bluffs's newspaper, The Daily Nonpareil.

Auditor Drake should be commended for her alertness and conscientiousness in ordering a manual check and asking the county board for a full recount. If she had not, the wrong candidates would have taken office.

Was the Pottawattamie error an isolated incident? Hardly. The ballot tabulators were programmed for this election under contract by the same company that sold the county the equipment. This company, Omaha-based Election Systems and Software, has a track record of ballot programming errors across the United States. In 2006 alone, ES&S has made major programming mistakes in Texas,  West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas.

The last several years also offer a rich history of ES&S mistakes, races in which straight-party votes failed to record at all, or recorded for the wrong party's candidates. Races in which all the votes went to one candidate, or were exactly reversed. This history can be examined at the website VotersUnite.org.  This organization has compiled accounts of the errors from reputable local news sources across the country, and from interviews with local officials

So, at least these errors create results so skewed that reasonably attentive election officials catch the problem quickly, right? Sorry, but no. Pottawattamie was lucky in that this error affected every race on the ballot, including a local race that was not expected to be competitive. Ballot programming is not rocket science, but it does involve many details. Errors can affect one, several, or every race on the ballot. The gross errors, like Pottawattamie's, are the ones that are caught. But if an error affected only a close race for a single office, no one might ever know.

Which brings us to the most disturbing part of the story. In 19 of Iowa's 99 counties, including Linn County, the primary voting system is a DRE (for Direct Record Electronic) touchscreen machine that records votes on an electronic ballot, unseen and unverified by the voter.  58 Iowa counties use both optical scan machines and paperless DREs.

The implications of using DREs are obvious, in light of the Pottawattamie snafu.  A misprogrammed DRE might record votes that are totally scrambled, just as the Optical Scan machines did.   But without paper ballots, there would be no hope of ever knowing who really won.

And coming in the next issue of IVI News:  A statewide survey now underway by IVI reveals that almost one in four votes in the Iowa June primary was cast on a DRE touchscreen.  Read about how this happened, and how wecan help it from happening again.

[Note: Portions of this section were published as a guest editorial in the July 2 issue of the Iowa City Press-Citizen.]


What You Can Do: Contact Our Legislators

Iowans for Voting Integrity is working with state legislators to draft legislation safeguarding the vote in Iowa.  This bill will require 1) a voter-verified paper record that is the official ballot for recounts, 2) random hand-counted audits of a sample of precincts, and 3) public disclosure of voting software. We will update you on this effort later this summer.

There is something you can do now. A proposed law to govern voting machines used in federal elections is gaining ground.  HR 550, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, has 193 cosponsors, including Iowans Jim Leach (R-2nd District) and Leonard Boswell (D-3rd District). 

There is no Senate companion to the bill at this time. H.R. 550 would require a voter-verified paper trail, random hand audits of 2% of the precincts in the nation, and public disclosure of vote-counting software. If you live in Rep. Leach's or Rep. Boswell's districts, contact them to thank them. Then contact Senator Grassley and Senator Harkin and call on them to sponsor a Senate companion bill.

If your Representative is Jim Nussle (1st District), Tom Latham (4th) or Steve King (5th) contact them and urge them to cosponsor 550 in the House. All three are Republicans, so you should remind them of 550's Republican support; Tom Cole (R-OK), Frank Wolf (R-VA), and Greg Walden (R-WA) are among the over 20 Republican cosponsors. Then contact Senator Grassley and Senator Harkin and urge them to sponsor a Senate version.

Contact information for all Iowa legislators is posted below.

Two notes on our Senators: