Washington Post: Editorials: The Iowa disaster makes it clear that we should stick to doing things the old fashioned way | The Washington Post
It's 2020. Should Americans really still be voting with pen and paper? The answer, amplified by this week’s meltdown in Iowa, is a resounding “yes.”
Editorials: Iowa’s message for the other states: Be ready for everything to go wrong | Lawrence Norden/The Washington Post
The Voting News for 02/10/2020 www.VerifiedVoting.org
National: Iowa Breakdown Reveals Broken Election Technology Ecosystem | Alyza Sebenius and Bill Allison/Bloomberg
The chaos at the Iowa caucus has been blamed on a small startup called Shadow Inc., but what happened this week is also emblematic of wider problems plaguing the world of election technology. It’s hard to get sophisticated technology companies to build such technology because most buyers have small budgets, and disappear after Election Day. In a four-year presidential election cycle, one campaign’s killer app is woefully obsolete by the next. So political parties and campaigns often create the technology themselves or hire small firms to do it for them. “The tech companies with depth of knowledge and understanding tend to shy away from building critical voting systems,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor and elections scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read More https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-08/iowa-breakdown-reveals-broken-election-technology-ecosystem
Editorials: The Iowa disaster makes it clear that we should stick to doing things the old fashioned way | The Washington Post
It's 2020. Should Americans really still be voting with pen and paper? The answer, amplified by this week’s meltdown in Iowa, is a resounding “yes.” The inaugural Democratic primary caucuses were thrown into disarray after the state’s vote-recording app imploded. Volunteers struggled to download the largely untested product, or to upload their counts onto it once they’d managed to get in. On top of that, what state party officials called a “coding issue” caused the program to spit out incorrect numbers even when results were successfully input. The one bit of good news amid all the bad: There’s a paper trail. Because precinct captains kept handwritten tallies of the outcome, voters can expect a reliable analog answer in the end — no matter how dysfunctional the digital system that delayed it. Election security experts have been insisting on backup paper ballots for votes everywhere, though it’s likely eight states will still be paperless come November’s presidential race. They’ve also been insisting that officials use the backups to conduct what are called risk-limiting audits: hand counts of a sample of all votes to make sure the computers have gotten it right. Read More https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-iowa-disaster-makes-it-clear-that-we-should-stick-to-doing-things-the-old-fashioned-way/2020/02/06/f0bf2472-4910-11ea-b4d9-29cc419287eb_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_opinions&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_opinions
Editorials: Iowa’s message for the other states: Be ready for everything to go wrong | Lawrence Norden/The Washington Post
Just when you thought the Iowa caucus debacle couldn’t get worse, it went full Murphy’s law. On Thursday, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called for a full recanvass of the results. Immediately, the Iowa Democratic Party responded that it would do so if a campaign requested it. As we all know now, the human and technical mistakes in Iowa were legion. Yet one overlooked fact in coverage of the meltdown is that the caucus was run by a state political party — not professional election officials. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important lessons for all the other primaries and caucuses in the weeks ahead. Here are the four most important things election officials can do to keep the 2020 election cycle free, fair and secure. Don’t roll out untested technology in a big election. As an election professional from Ohio recently told me, “Macy’s wouldn’t roll out new cash registers on Black Friday.” There is a ton of new technology, from voting machines to electronic pollbooks, being employed in 2020. And for the most part, it is long overdue. For years, we have neglected our election infrastructure in the United States, with states using voting machines and registration databases with unnecessary security and reliability flaws. The key, however, is to test out this technology in low-stakes, low-turnout elections throughout the year — a best practice that the Iowa Democratic Party ignored. Read More https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/07/iowas-message-other-states-be-ready-everything-go-wrong/?utm_campaign=wp_opinions_pm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_popns
Editorials: Messing with elections messes with democracy | Ross Ramsey/The Texas Tribune
Elections depend on trust — on the idea that the declared winners and losers were the real winners and losers. So how’s that going right now? “In a democracy, people have to have faith that elections are being run fairly, so that losers will accept the results and fight another day,” says Rick Hasen, an elections lawyer and professor at the University of California-Irvine. “That’s been taken for granted in this country and, effectively, no longer can be, with so much stress on our system and so much agitation that undermines confidence.” He’s written a book — “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy” — that went public Tuesday. That’s the day the Iowa caucuses started coming to pieces. “Confidence is the system,” Hasen says. “We don’t have a single election system. We have all of these pieces that fit together so that there’s legitimacy to the process. At some point, that can break down and you could have a substantial number of people who say, ‘This is broken, and I don’t believe this was a fair election.’ That’s what I’m really worried about.” Read More https://www.texastribune.org/2020/02/07/messing-elections-messes-democracy/
Editorials: How to Prevent the Next Election Meltdown | Richard L. Hasen/Wall Street Journal
Will your vote be fairly and accurately counted in the 2020 elections? It’s a question on a lot of people’s minds after this week’s fiasco in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, and it reminds us of a troubling fact: Nearly two decades after the Florida debacle over the 2000 presidential vote, too many places in the U.S. are still vulnerable to an election meltdown. Such anxieties add to well-founded concerns about the possibility of cyberattacks on our voting systems, by Russia or other malign actors. What’s worse, in today’s hyperpolarized, social-media-driven environment, such voting problems provide sensational grist for conspiracy theories that may further undermine Americans’ confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the 2020 elections. Over the past decade, a familiar frame has developed in the contentious debate over voting rules: Republicans express concern about voter fraud and enact laws supposedly intended to combat it; Democrats see these laws as an attempt to suppress Democratic votes, press for measures to expand voting access and rights, and worry about cyberattacks intended to help the GOP at the polls. It is an important debate, in which I have taken part, but it misses a deeper, more urgent reality: Most American voters in 2020 are much more likely to be disenfranchised by an incompetent election administrator than by fraud, suppression or Russian hacking. Read More https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-prevent-the-next-election-meltdown-11581091661