|
October 7, 2004 The Colorado Open Records Act requires that
public records be made available to the public. This protects the public
from officials who would hide public information in order to cover up errors or
wrongdoing. Republicans want to access the August
Primary computer files needed to verify that votes were correctly interpreted
and counted. Independently, a local computer consultant
and member of The Republicans made their request on
September 8th and the law requires that the county comply within
three days. “The clerk has offered a series of
bogus arguments to avoid compliance with our request,” said The clerk has claimed that the files are
company confidential information belonging to HART InterCivic. The clerk
made a similar claim in 2001 when it tried to block public access to the files
stored in Diebold equipment. Diebold corporate attorneys finally agreed that
the records were not Diebold proprietary information. The clerk claims that exporting a flat
file of vote records would disclose the HART table structures. The GOP
says that this is not true. It is common practice to export flat files in
order to protect confidential data structures. The clerk and the Secretary of State argue
that a court order is required to access “voted ballots.” But
in fact the law is explicit and uses the term “voted ballots” to
refer to the paper ballots marked by the voter. Republicans do not want access to the
paper ballots. They want access to the file of scanned ballot images, and
the file of interpreted votes from each ballot image – to ensure that
each vote is correctly interpreted. The party today sent the clerk another
(the fourth) appeal that the clerk follow the law and provide the records. Official Party Election Representative 303-494-1540 www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz
http://coloradovoter.blogspot.com From: alkolwicz
[mailto:alkolwicz@xxxxxxxxx] Ms. Salas, We have just sent you by FAX the letter identified above as
“Open Records - Reject of reply from Official Party Election Representative 303-494-1540 www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz
http://coloradovoter.blogspot.com |