Officials vow smooth election
Clerk?s office hopes to avoid repeat of last year

By Brad Turner
The Longmont Daily Times-Call   01 November 2005

BOULDER ? Today?s ballot tally at the Boulder County clerk?s office will not resemble last year?s election train wreck, elections coordinator Josh Liss vowed Monday afternoon.

?I?m positive we?ll get the counting done tomorrow night,? Liss said.

The statement was a bold one for a Boulder County elections manager. Printing problems and general confusion in the ballot-tallying room contributed to a ballot count that dragged on for 68 hours last year.

But this year?s election presents fewer challenges, Liss said. Unlike the precinct polling in the 2004 election, county officials conducted today?s contest by mail.

  
Officials began tallying ballots Oct. 22. Most of about 57,000 ballots returned to the county by 2 p.m. Monday had already been scanned into the $1.4 million Hart InterCivic voting system and counted, Liss said.

?The scanning and resolution is going just wonderfully,? Liss said. ?We?ve kept up on a daily basis with the ballots we received that day.?

Since all ballots must be received by 7 p.m. today to be counted, last-minute voters should not mail their ballots, Liss said. Instead, they should them off at one of three clerk?s office locations: 1750 33rd St. in Boulder, 529 Coffman St. in Longmont or 722 Main St. in Louisville.

Active registered voters who did not receive a mail ballot should call the county?s elections division at 303-413-7740, or head to 1750 33rd St. in Boulder to request and fill out a ballot, Liss said. Voters who requested a ballot Monday afternoon spent about 45 minutes being processed and voting, Liss said.

Joe Pezzillo, a voting activist who lobbied against the Hart InterCivic purchase in 2004 and advocated scrapping the system after last year?s election, said he hopes it performs well this year. But he raised questions about the reliability of the election results Monday.

During a recent test tally of 429 ballots, machines misinterpreted results from seven of those ballots because a fold ran through a check box on one of the ballot items, officials said. Election managers said they would manually resolve ballots with a fold bisecting a box.

But Pezzillo said officials should go a step further and manually audit the results of today?s election.

?I hope it goes incredibly well. If it does, I hope that?s not used as an excuse to avoid auditing the results, especially considering the fact that we had a 1.6 percent error rate during testing,? Pezzillo said.

Liss said only ?a small number? of the mail ballots were affected by the fold problems and the tally has still been remarkably smooth.

The only other major snag in this year?s election was a misplaced set of ballots for voters living along two postal routes in Niwot. Those ballots were delivered to residents early last week after being misplaced.