CFVI Advice to CO Voters

["Robert Mcgrath" <mcgrath_mcnally@xxxxxxx>]

All:
CFVI has taken baby steps in advocating the methods we believe CO voters 
should use in attempting to cast a verifiable vote.

Part of this is because we have evolved from supporting or opposing 
legislation, to placing hope in an injunction against use of DRE machines, 
to dwelling on a possible "choice of evils" approach that Jefferson County 
has offered that we could lift up to other counties across the state.

There comes a time when we must provide concrete direction to the voters on 
how they should act to strive for making sure their vote will count.

Here is what I know:

1. We want voters to choose paper.  Paper, for the sake of affecting the 
largest impact in the state, may result in telling people to choose absentee 
ballots.

2. We know Jefferson County has offered voters a choice of paper ballots in 
the polling place, but we are unclear what status that paper ballot has -- 
whether it is treated as a provisional ballot or absentee ballot -- and 
whether it will even be counted if machine counts already suggest no race 
results would change by counting paper.   We also know that Jeffco has 
claimed they would count all paper ballots via optical scanner.  We may not 
wish to have our paper ballots treated as provisional, in which they are 
subjected to a supreme level of scrutiny to be discarded.

3. We realize that choosing absentee ballots may create less anonymity, and 
that election officials could use any early tabulations of absentee ballots 
to learn how races are leaning in order to inform party officials to call in 
more voters to change the results.  It may be necessary, as one seasoned 
election judge (thank you Charles) suggested, that we advocate people choose 
absentee and cast it at the last possible moment in person at their county 
offices  and authentic drop-off points.

4. Since absentee ballots are provided in all counties in the state, this 
may be the most uniform way to get people to cast verifiable ballots.

5. We have been informed that we have limited chances of legal success to 
compel election officials to turn off the voting machines.   We may have 
better luck focusing upon verification of the counting of ballots than of 
the casting of the ballots.

6. We may need to focus upon the concept of offering "accurate count squads" 
of citizens who will offer to do statistical hand counts of all counties 
utilizing optical scanners, and pair this with a campaign for absentee 
ballots to increase the use of such optical scan counts over DRE counts.

We need to finalize our approach within the next 2 weeks so we may begin 
engaging in our six-month media campaign to educate voters in time to affect 
the August primary, and to design our training for poll watchers and 
election judges.

I would welcome replies and discussion on this topic in order to bring this 
to a head, and then to closure.  Thank you.

Bob McGrath
Director, CFVI
P.S.  I realize there is a national movement to force some federal 
legislation onto the House and Senate floor, which might add paper printers 
for receipts.  We have taken a stand that favors these bills only if they 
amend their treatment of paper receipts/paper trail to become voter-verified 
full-text paper ballots, and to treat those items as the instruments that 
are themselves counted.   to rely upon these paper receipts for recount 
purposes only does not go far enough.  The best we can hope for with any of 
these national bills, is to have them pass so late that their back-up 
provision that compels a return to a solely paper-based election would kick 
in due to no time to implement printers for this year's elections in 
November.

The Nation's eyes will be upon Colorado this summer, since there will be 
closely contested primaries for U.S. Senate and Denver D.A.  These races 
will command even further scrutiny if we succeed in elevating the issue of 
non-verifiable voting and related concerns/problems to the media and to the 
public on a national scale.