And for a change, it’s not all bad! It even made a mainstream paper:

his Guest Editorial was published in The Iowa City Press-Citizen. It is reposted with permission of the author.

The June 6 primary election 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 Pottawattamie 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 race on the ballot, and the county ordered a full hand recount of all races. Sciortino won his race for the renomination of his party, and a county board race also was reversed. The Pottawattamie election snafu was covered extensively in Council Bluffs’ newspaper, The Daily Nonpareil.

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, 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, Indiana, 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 Web sites verifiedvoting.org and VoteTrustUSA.org; these sites have 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 race for the U.S. Congress, governor or the state senate — and that race was closely fought — no one would know. Last Tuesday’s primary could have been affected, and we would not know.

Which brings us to the most disturbing part of the story. In 18 of Iowa’s 99 counties, the primary voting system is a touchscreen machine that offers the voter no independent record of his or her vote. These touchscreen machines have an internal paper audit roll which is never seen by the voter, but if the ballot has been programmed incorrectly, the paper audit roll could simply show incorrect results. Some errors would show, but given all the definitions that go into a full ballot, many errors would not be caught.

And if a programmer had deliberately inserted malicious code intended to switch votes, it would be very simple to have the screen show the voter’s intent but the internal roll show an opposite vote. This last concern has been raised by University of Iowa Professor Doug Jones, a voting machine expert, as well as a slew of other highly respected computer scientists. Again, Pottawattamie is lucky to have chosen paper ballots, and to have an auditor willing to hand-count them when necessary.

In Johnson County, we also have an auditor, Tom Slockett, who gets the issue. Currently, we use both the ES&S paper ballot scanner and an ES&S touchscreen machine, the iVotronic. Johnson County Auditor Tom Slockett is a strong supporter of a voter-verified paper trail, and has already purchased the printers (that would print records that voters would actually see on paper) for the iVotronic touchscreen machine.

I’m tempted to tell people to move to areas where the voting officials “get it,” short of such action I’m not really sure why anyone would feel that their votes are counted.

Hat tip to Pie at the Crack Den. You rule, woman!