The ballots were challenged on the grounds that the students do not reside at the address they listed when they registered to vote. The students registered to vote at 1115 8th Ave., which is the address on campus where they receive mail. However, it is not the physical address of their dormitories.

The students were told to register that way by county election officials because the inability of students to receive mail at their physical address made it difficult to produce proof of residency.

The board ruled that because the ballots didn’t change the outcome of any elections they could be counted.

Poweshiek County Auditor Diana Dawley told the Associated Press that state election officials have indicated the rules governing student registration will need to be clarified in the wake of this challenge.

John H. T. Main Residence Hall on the Grinnell College campus. The school has a long tradition of supporting liberal, Democratic candidates.

The students in question reside in Iowa House District 75, where a heated campaign is being waged between incumbent Democrat Eric Palmer and Republican Danny Carroll.

In 2004, the same matchup was decided by a little more than 300 votes — in Carroll’s favor.  Palmer won by a slightly larger margin in their 2006 rematch.

Grinnell students have a long history of supporting Democratic candidates.  The elimination of 50 votes could tip the balance of the election to Carroll.

Poweshiek County Auditor Diana Dawley said the ballots were challenged on the grounds that the students do not reside at the address they listed when they registered to vote.

The students registered to vote at 1115 8th Ave., which is the address on campus where they receive mail. However, it is not the physical address of their dormitories, Dawley said, which brought on the challenges.

The Grinnell College Campus Democrats claimed in an online posting that students who voted early at satellite voting stations were told by Poweshiek County elections officials to register in that way because the inability of students to receive mail at their physical address made it difficult to produce proof of residency.

Dawley said a hearing on the challenged ballots would be held Nov. 6 at noon, at which time it will be determined whether the votes count. The auditor’s office will send out notices to the affected voters so that they can be present at the hearing.

Each of the ballot challenges were made individually in accordance with new Iowa election laws that make it illegal to issue a group or “blanket” challenge.

Iowa absentee ballot with outer envelope and secrecy envelope.

Dawley, a Democrat, then referred all questions to Poweshiek County Attorney Mike Mahaffey. The receptionist at Mahaffey’s law office in Montezuma said he would be unavailable until Tuesday morning. Mahaffey is a former Republican candidate for Congress.

Carroll said he was unaware of the challenges until told about it by the Iowa Independent, but that his only concern is that the law is obeyed.

“When it comes to voting, I just want everyone to follow the law,” he said.

In regards to the students claim that they received their instructions about which address to use for voter registration from county officials, Carroll said that’s something that would have to be resolved by the auditor’s office and would have nothing to do with his campaign.

Palmer’s campaign did not wish to comment on this story.

The presidential campaign of Democrat Barack Obama has targeted universities around the state in a massive get out the vote effort. The campaign’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Lee, said that the students in question are clearly eligible to vote and the campaign is “confident the matter will get resolved in a timely fashion.”

In other counties with larger student populations, such as Story and Johnson counties, there have been no reports of major ballot challenge efforts.

Richard Vedder, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) writing for Forbes, took a direct swipe at the popular college and university rankings produced by U.S. News & World Report, saying the “rankings ought to get a D.”

While the U.S. News rankings didn’t give Iowa institutions glowing marks, both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University ranked in the top 100. Iowa ranked 64th while Iowa State ranked 85th on the list of all national universities. On the list of national public universities, Iowa ranked 24 and Iowa State ranked 38. Both have significant slips backward in the rankings compiled by Vedder and CCAP.

“We start with the premise that consumers want two things when they buy a good or service,” Vedder wrote in an announcement on the CCAP blog. “First, they want to be satisfied using the good — it is easy to use, safe, etc. Second, they want it to do the job for which it is intended. We think ratings of colleges should reflect how colleges do in meeting those objectives. The US News rankings are more based on resources or inputs used or on institutional reputation. The two sets of rankings are moderately highly correlated with one another, but there are important differences.”

The CCAP rankings utilized student perceptions gleaned from the ratemyprofessors.com Web site, alumni presences in “Who’s Who in America,” student success in national award competitions, and the probability of graduating from college in four years. In writing for Forbes, Vedder explains that he believes the rankings compiled by U.S. News are the “equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses” instead of rating the actual meal.

The CCAP rankings, however, did offer some praise for two of Iowa’s liberal arts schools. Both Cornell College in Mount Vernon and Luther College in Decorah barely ranked in U.S. News’ top 100. Cornell rose to CCAP’s top 25, ranking 24th overall. Luther didn’t rise quite as far, but moved up 10 slots to number 87 in the CCAP rankings.

Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in Grinnell, fared much worse, dropping from 11 on the U.S. News rankings to 55th on the CCAP scorecard.

Ohio University, the school where Vedder is a professor of economics, rose on both the national university and national public university rankings.

The CCAP was founded by Vedder in 2006 with a $200,000 grant by the Searle Freedom Trust, founded by Daniel Searle. It wasn’t the first time that the two teamed up. Searle was a large monetary contributor for Vedder’s 2004 book, “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,” through a program at the American Enterprise Institute. It was Vedder’s injection of personal conservative ideology in that book that has garnered him criticism as an enemy of higher education.

The attention to the book “got us thinking that there’s really a lot more work to be done,” Kimberly Dennis, executive director of the Searle Freedom Trust, told reporter Doug Lederman in May 2006. “No one

Now director of research and analysis for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Thielmann returned to his alma mater, Grinnell College in Iowa, and delivered a speech to his reuniting class based on recently declassified information about the Tonkin Gulf attack. The speech, titled "'Great Is the Shame…' the Use of Intelligence during Vietnam" did not address the flawed intelligence of the Iraq War, but of its gruesome cousin, the war in Vietnam. Though Thielmann does not mention Iraq, it is impossible to divorce the two as he discusses “a tale of mistakes made by intelligence analysts under the press of time and political pressure.”

The entire speech, provided by Thielmann, is below the fold.

“Great is the Shame…”

The Use of Intelligence during  Vietnam

by Greg  Thielmann

Grinnell College Reunion (Classes of  '71, '72, '73)

Grinnell College

June 2, 2007

Today I would like to dip into  a little history from the Vietnam War era – both personal and public — to  illustrate how intelligence information can be used and abused when a democracy  wages war.

I made a similar presentation  to contemporary Grinnell students last year. I then said that the Vietnam War  probably seemed as remote to them as the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia (in 1934)  did to my generation. The Vietnam War had ended some three decades before they  stepped onto this campus. Even then, it was a Cold War side-show to the  center-stage standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet for the three  classes in our cluster, this was our war. Hardly any of us went to  Southeast Asia, but we were all profoundly affected by what was happening there.  I remember the Vietnam War as an uninvited, unwelcome, and glowering guest  during our college years. It shadowed every aspect of our Grinnell experience in  the late 60s and early 70s — from our political discussions, to our music, even  to what we imbibed, inhaled, or swallowed. It influenced our personal  philosophies and helped shape our career plans.

We were socialized,  radicalized, and divided by the war. It was a war fueled by the draft. When we  started at Grinnell, the draft hung over all American males of college age. And  Grinnell women happened to have boy friends, best friends, and brothers who were  also subject to the draft. That college attendance allowed us to postpone  eligibility for the draft was an important consideration for some of us.  Contemplating what awaited us upon graduation was a factor in our alienation  from older generations, a factor in the protests, in the use of drugs, the  interest in the Peace Corps, the lure of Canada. And all of us experienced the  early closing of Grinnell College in 1970, following the invasion of Cambodia  and the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State.

I would like to take advantage  of a recently declassified article about an incident that propelled us into the  full-scale war Vietnam became – the Tonkin Gulf attack. And then I want to  relate a personal anecdote from the final months of the war ten years later,  when I had my first job with the State Department.

The Beginning

The Tonkin Gulf attack occurred  in August of 1964 when we were all teenagers. I was living just down the road in  Newton, a rising 9^th grader, who had been rudely introduced to  political events by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the killing of President  Kennedy. And I was beginning to read about Vietnam in The Des Moines  Register.

In the summer of 1964, the  Vietnam conflict was still primarily a struggle between the Communist Viet Cong  and the non-Communist government in Saigon. We were told that the conflict was  an effort to protect an independent and “free” South Vietnam from domination by  Communist North Vietnam and to halt the further spread of Communism in Asia. I  was not yet privy to the perspective that the war was another stage of the  struggle to liberate Vietnam from colonial control and to unify the country as  promised in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Vietnam had become an issue in the  Presidential campaign between Republican Barry Goldwater and President Lyndon  Johnson. In partisan political terms, it was a question of bringing the full  might of the