Tampering
During Certification Meeting: Jerry Depew's 3rd and Final Report from
Monday's Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines Meeting
by Jerry Depew, Laurens, Iowa
Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections
Rewriting software is not for beginners. But what if your ballot counter is misbehaving? Should you reprogram it? Even in the middle of a public certification meeting?
They did
it Monday in the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Election Systems and
Software of Omaha was there to gain official approval of its new
equipment. But after they had used the new ballot marking gadget to
mark some ballots for a test election, the ballot scanner made a
mistake in the tally.
The
scanner reads and counts those paper ballots at the speed of light. It
can be quite reliable if the ballots are properly marked and the
scanner is carefully calibrated and correctly programmed. But the
scanner must know the rules for counting and that can be tricky.
Now this
ballot scanner was not really being tested Monday, according to the
folks in the room. It was indeed on the agenda, but it had also been
tested and approved last year before the newest gadget for handicapped
voters was for sale. Today it was needed to read and count the ballots
created by the new gadget because the examiners wanted to see that
those new ballots were actually decipherable by the M100 counter.
So it
wasn’t the new gadget that was tripping up the older scanner, it was
the programming in the scanner. Apparently this particular test ballot
had not been tried during the earlier approval process. So now, what to
do?
Phone
home. The ES&S men called Omaha to see what could be done. It was
decided to “burn new media,” thus reprogramming the scanner on the
spot. The chair of the board of examiners observed, “We’ve never had to
do this before. We’ve never had to reprogram.”
About an hour later the technician stuck a memory card into the M100 and tried the small stack of ballots again. Success.
When I told software tester John Washburn about this by email later, he wrote back:
WHAT!! …REPROGRAMMED WHILE WE WAITED…!!
Calmer now. Pulse returning to normal.
Calm blue oceans.
Breathe in, Breathe out.
This
stark response prompted me to ask another question: Were they tampering
with already certified equipment when they reprogrammed the machine? He
said, “Yes.”
What
have we learned from this? We know the ballot scanner worked on Monday.
It did what it was told by the software it was using. We know that you
can’t really tell what is in the software. We know it is easily changed
if the vote count is not going to your liking.
But we
can also wonder a few things. Do election officials know what
constitutes tampering with their equipment? Who do they trust to mess
with the programming? Do some Iowa counties now have in their
possession brand new equipment that is programmed to improperly count
some ballots?
Just wondering.
Jerry Depew of Laurens, Iowa, runs the non-partisan blog, Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections, and has granted Blog for Iowa permission to reprint his report.
Blog For Iowa 
Thank you for another fine report, Jerry. Unfortunately, it sounds like the inmates are running the asylum.
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Linda: Our elected officials have, on our behalf, signed nondisclosure statements with multiple corporations. They have without exception, experienced for themselves, that proprietary voting systems eliminate the voters of Iowa's right to vote. We are the inmates in this asylum. Our elected officials are not. What options are there?
One option, is to register to vote, then leave without voting. By not voting, we make a statement. Keeping in mind, our vote won't count, anyway, as it is a secret vote, the voters of Iowa have an opportunity to speak up through a nonvote voice.
Another option, is to give those voters in Iowa, who have lost their right to vote, an opportunity to vote, even if that vote is “unofficial”. Our unelected governor can then explain to our “unofficial elected” governor, why he/she isn't in office.
A third option asks legal experts whether the signed nondisclosure statements our elected officials hide behind, are legally binding, and whether signing such statements crosses the line of authority granted by the citizens of Iowa.
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Hi, Tom–
I don't know if I'd go for that leave without voting idear. If we protested in that manner, we'd hand over a legitimate win to all those who are rigged to win anyway.
Your option 3 looks interesting.
I'll be interested in seeing how the Republicans are going to pull off a victory in Congress this year – how many times do the polls have to be “wrong” before the American public wakes up to the rigging?
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Linda: Our country starts with our right to vote, and everything else follows. When our right to vote is eliminated, and we no longer have our right to vote, we no longer enjoy the luxury of a civil society. The fact is, when you and I go into the voting booth in a few months, it makes no difference to those who will carry out a secret vote count. The only purpose we serve, is to go through the motions, so that those who have taken away our right to vote, can feel good about reporting their secret vote count, at the expense of those who foolishly think their vote actually counted.
Denying that proprietary voting systems eliminate our right to vote is not going to give us our right to vote back. Voters in Iowa need to accept this fact, and decide how we will respond. The bottom line is, election procedures are in the state's hands, not the federal government. Not other states.
Does anyone know what the current exit polling policy is for Iowa?
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You're preaching to the choir, Tom. Just go here:
http://www.blogforiowa.com/blog/ProjectMythBreaker
and you'll see how Blog for Iowa and Democracy for Iowa have been participating in this issue since almost two years ago. It was our first big project after the Dean campaign collapsed.
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Linda: Terrific! Does anyone have a handle on how exit polling is done in Iowa?
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I'm trying to look into this. It may take some time. I thought I'd start by looking at the Iowa Code pertaining to election laws, but have been getting error messages all day on that site. I've written to their webmaster to see if it can be fixed.
Once it's fixed, I'll post that site in our Great Tools list on the left sidebar. In the meantime, here's the link:
http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IowaLaw.html
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