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Hawkeye Area Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa
December 2, 2007 Board Meeting Activity
Board Members Present: Dean Abel, Caroline Dieterle, Evan Fales, Robert Givens, Nathan Handler, David Muller, David Redlawsk, Rebecca Reiter, Ruth Spinks
Board Members Absent: Marty Condon, Peter Hansen
Attending: Shawn Flaherty, Chia-Hsing Lu of the State Board, Dorothy Paul
President Robert Givens convened the meeting at 1:33 pm in Room 216, English-Philosophy Building, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Old Business
- ACLU-Iowa Board Report (Dave Muller): New members to the State Board are Mohammad Farooq, Brian Farrell, Rick Hunsaker, and Keri Manning. Kelley Putman announced a new affirmative action policy for nominations for board membership. Marty Ryan gave a legislative update.
- Appointments to the National Board: Ruth Spinks reported a conversation with Ben Stone regarding her concerns about how delegates to the national ACLU board are chosen. Ben offered advice on the procedures that should be followed to petition for a change in the rules.
- Iowa City Ballot Initiative D: Caroline Dieterle thanked the Board and the ACLU of Iowa for assistance with and financial support for the ballot initiative. She noted that the campaign is still ~$180 in the red. Pursuant to passage of the initiative, the City Council must change the city Charter. Caroline intends to write a letter to the City Attorney asking (a) to include language for procedures citizens could follow to request the Police Review Board hold additional fora in the event of a major incident (e.g., a signed request from 25 citizens), and (b) concerning Chapter 8 of the city code: there seems to be no existing language protecting the anonymity of an officer against whom a complaint has been lodged; Caroline will suggest a procedure to protect identities but give the Board knowledge of whether there have been repeated complaints against the same officer, by assigning each officer a code number.
Ruth Spinks suggested the Board also be informed of actions taken by the Police Dept. in response to complaints. Ruth also mentioned the Citizen’s Police Academy in Iowa City.
- Hawkeye Chapter Website: Nathan Handler estimates the site will cost about $20 a year. There was discussion about the domain name; consensus was reached that it be aclu-hawkeye.org. Discussion of what information to post on the site yielded the following suggestions: Spinks – Contact information, meeting times, meeting minutes. Handler – the Board charter, news. Dieterle – the Bill of Rights; Caroline volunteered to help write the content. Abel – members could volunteer to provide their email addresses. Givens – the site should have a link to the State ACLU website, and should carry a notice that the ACLU does not litigate personal lawsuits.
- Replacement for Carrie LaSeur on the Chapter Board: Robert talked to Elizabeth Sparks. There was some discussion about the options of leaving the Board at its present size, as opposed to replacing Carrie. There was some sentiment that it would be good to replace, so as to have a lawyer on the Board.
- Dave Muller reported that Ben Stone was outraged over the cameras installed in the Iowa City Public Library restrooms. However, the Board decided to drop this item from future agendas.
New Business
- Voting Machine Security: Shawn Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity gave an informative overview of national and state issues concerning voting machines. Some states have taken action, but Congress has not acted yet. In part, the miserable security measures that have been designed into voting machines are the result of manufacturer consolidation: larger companies buying manufacturers and companies providing election services and tech support and not rectifying their design errors. Two or three companies now control the voting machine market. The paper ballots provision of the Help America Vote Act was removed by Congress at the last minute. 29% of votes cast in the last election were cast on paperless direct-report machines. Diebold made the voting machines used in 77 out of 99 Iowa counties. There are multiple avenues for cheating: by vendors, custodians of machines, in some cases by anyone who has access to a machine for a few minutes. The allegedly independent testing authorities are in fact not independent: they are paid by the voting machine companies; and they have no statutory authority. Iowa’s testing company, Cyber, can’t document their testing and have been canned. Voter-verified paper record laws have been passed in 38 states. Yet to come are routine hand-count audits (15 states are moving on this). The ideal would be to have voter-marked optically scanned paper ballots, though this will cost money (I believe the figure was $8 – 10 million for Iowa.) At the Federal level, the Nelson-Whitehouse Bill, HR 2295, has been introduced to mandate voting machine reform. Flaherty mentioned also an informative movie, Hacking Democracy.
- Annual Dinner: Chia-Hsing announced that the dinner has been scheduled for 6:30pm on April 12; it will be preceded, as was last year’s, by a conference on civil liberties from 1pm – 5pm in the afternoon. The State Board will request help from the Hawkeye Chapter on picking up attendees at the airport, and with other details (e.g., conference session monitors) to be announced at the February Chapter Board meeting.
- The next meeting of the Board was scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 10, at 1:30 in the Iowa City Public Library.
Respectfully submitted,
Evan Fales
Secretary, Hawkeye Chapter Board
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