Daily Camera: County weighs voting system

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This appeared in today's Daily Camera.

<http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/city_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2422_2572019,00.html>


- Paul


County weighs voting system

By Ryan Morgan, Camera Staff Writer
January 13, 2004

Officials want to buy system that scans paper ballots into computer

Boulder County election officials will ask the county commissioners for 
permission to buy a new voting system that uses paper ballots later this 
month.

Tom Halicki, the county's election manager, said the Clerk and Recorder's 
Office wants to buy a system from Lafayette-based Hart InterCivic.

The system would require voters to fill out paper ballots, which would 
then be fed through a machine that scans the entire ballot into a computer 
and reads the vote off of that image. The system should be fast and 
accurate, Halicki said.

"There's going to be a lot of time-saving with this system," he said.

The Hart system is also flexible, allowing election workers to print up
ballots on short notice -- a handy feature if voter turnout should
suddenly spike, he said.

And because the system uses paper ballots, it shouldn't suffer from the 
concerns that plague computer-based systems that critics charge are 
vulnerable to tampering.

Paper ballots were a key demand of a group called Citizens for Verifiable 
Voting, which protested earlier this year when election officials debated 
buying systems that tally votes using a computer.

Joe Pezzillo and other members of his group were thrilled when county 
officials announced late last year that they wouldn't buy a system that 
enters votes electronically.

But Pezzillo said the county quickly decided on another system without 
consulting his group, without holding public hearings and without taking 
enough time.

"We really think buying a new system is really rash at this point," 
Pezzillo said.

Pezzillo said he would like the county to lease a system until a set of 
national voting standards is agreed upon by officials at the National 
Institute of Standards and Technology. Otherwise, he said, election 
workers could get stuck with an expensive system that doesn't meet new 
requirements.

"They want to buy this system knowing full well that the new requirements 
might not match that system," Pezzillo said.

He also criticized the county for announcing its desire to purchase a 
system when the cost isn't yet known.

Halicki said election workers are still trying to figure out exactly how 
much it will cost, and they will have figures available when they make 
their case to the Boulder County Commissioners at 2 p.m. Jan. 29.

Halicki said the county needs a new system in time for this year's 
elections in the fall. Leasing a voting system is difficult and expensive, 
and when the lease expires, he said, the county still doesn't have a 
system.

"It's money that you're not going to get back," he said.

He also said the standards NIST adopts are not likely to be radically 
different from those employed by new systems such as the one the county 
would purchase.

Contact Ryan Morgan at (303) 473-1333 or morganr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx