BOULDER ?
County officials will hold a mock election in July to work out kinks in
their new electronic voting system and reassure skeptics of the new
technology.
Tuesday, the Boulder County Commissioners approved a $1.3 million
contract with Hart InterCivic, which makes the BallotNow system.
Using BallotNow, voters will mark paper ballots that will be read and
tallied by a computer. The system is more sophisticated, and therefore
less trustworthy, according to skeptics, than the county?s current
DataVote punch-card system.
County officials say they believe the new system offers the best of
both worlds: the speed of electronic counting with the authenticity of
paper ballots.
?In purchasing this equipment, we are preserving the option of a hand
count should the need arise,? Commissioner Paul Danish said. ?There is no
reason not to move forward.?
Skeptics say there are 162,826 reasons for caution. That?s the number
of registered voters in Boulder County.
Elections experts acknowledge that hand counts are error-prone unless
extensive double-checking is conducted.
Computers can count votes faster, but there are dozens of residents who
believe computers need to be double-checked. More than 130 county
residents have signed an online petition seeking some form of hand
counting in the upcoming elections.
?Hand counting isn?t going to solve all the problems with an election,
but it will help us catch problems caused by machines counting
incorrectly, either by fraud or by error,? said Paul Walmsley, a Boulder
computer programmer who has been active in the debate.
He added: ?I don?t know if there?s any reasonable way to be 100 percent
confident in an election result (but) elections that are counted by
computers should include some method to test that the computer is counting
correctly.?
The commissioners on Tuesday also agreed to send a letter to state
elections officials seeking clarification about the possibility of hand
counting the upcoming primary and general elections.
The commissioners also are seeking permission to conduct a
statistically significant hand count during the real elections, not just
the July test.