RE: What is Boulder County trying to hide?

["Paul Tiger" <paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Let me be clear that I was misinformed and now stand corrected: in that
there is a barcode that does track the ballot itself with these new ballots.
And I didn't learn this from this email from Joe.

However, there was a unique identifier on ballots in the past as well. A
number that appeared on the ballot and on the tear off stubs. Once the stubs
were removed and the ballots cast it would have been very difficult for
anyone to match them up again - if done at the clerk's office. It might have
been possible for this to happen at the precinct polling location, but I
think from my experience as a precinct judge that it would have required a
cabal of individual judges to perform. I seriously doubt that it would
happen; that three or more people (all citizens sworn to uphold elections
laws) would join forces to find out how a person had voted. At least that's
my personal opinion.

The purpose of those numbers in the past was to be sure that only those
ballots printed by (or for) the county were the ones that were cast. The
problem with that theory was that with 190K ballot packages it would have
been impossible to figure out if more than one ballot package had the same
sequence number. That's because people would have to read the number,
somehow keep track of them, and then compare them. An daunting and likely
impossible task. And I have said 'ballot packages', because those that
experienced the punch card system understand that it wasn't one ballot card
for each election, but many. Each card had its own number printed on it.

With the system that exists now, a barcode, a computer can read and store
the identifying number to be sure that someone did not create their own
ballot and cast it. A photocopy of an absentee ballot would work, except
that the unique identifying number (by barcode) would be the same as one
that had been officially issued.
If a query of the database showed more than one ballot with the same unique
identifier, then it would be understood that ballot fraud had taken place.
In such a case it is unlikely that any of the ballots with the same number
would be counted. Also that all those ballots would likely all be gathered
together and given to law enforcement for investigation and subsequent
prosecution.

So my apologies for stating that there is no unique identifier. I was simply
misinformed and mistaken in claiming otherwise.
However, I still support the use of a unique identifier to prevent ballot
fraud.

Paul Tiger

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Pezzillo [mailto:jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 9:19 AM
To: Cvv-Discuss@Coloradovoter. Net
Cc: HIllary Hall; LPBC Chairman; chair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxx; board@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: What is Boulder County trying to hide?


Sorry, Paul and Bo, you don't appear to have a clue about what you're
talking about, but please, feel free keep making your party (and
yourselves) look so bad.

And according to Clay Evans in the Daily Camera:

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/insight/article/
0,1713,BDC_2494_3093344,00.html

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