vote counting nearly over

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Except for a few hundred damaged ballots, and about 2500 provisional
ballots, the counting is over.  Thanks to the many dedicated
volunteers and workers.  See the Daily Camera story below.

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60

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http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/election/article/0,1713,BDC_16316_3309718,00.html

		   Finally, vote counting is over

	  Printing problems emerge as major cause of delay

		By Ryan Morgan, Camera Staff Writer
			  November 6, 2004

Boulder County election officials finished counting ballots Friday
evening, more than 72 hours after the polls closed on Election Day.

For many voters, that was about 60 hours too long.

"It feels like we were disenfranchised," said Phoebe Norton of
Boulder. "Our votes didn't matter in the presidential election."

The counting of the returns from all Boulder County precincts --
except for about 2,500 provisional ballots and 200 to 300 damaged
ballots that must be checked before they can be tallied -- was
completed shortly after 7 p.m. Friday.

Printing problems emerged as a major cause of the delay in counting
votes, officials said. The Hart-InterCivic scanning system looks for
voters' ink-filled boxes in certain places on the ballots, but the
150,000 ballots delivered by EagleDirect, a Denver printing company,
had errors that confused the computer.

Thousands of otherwise flawless ballots had to be counted by
resolution committees consisting of a technician and two judges, one
each from the Democratic and Republican parties. Exhausted volunteers
slumped in chairs and stared at the wall where ballots were projected
Friday morning.

The Houston counting room at the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder's
Office was strewn with empty envelopes, pieces of paper marked
"temporary timesheet," packages of pretzels and Milky Ways, half-empty
water bottles and empty coffee cups.

"The voters did the right things for the most part. They colored in
the right boxes," said Barb Kostanick, a Boulder Republican who
volunteered as an election judge. "But the boxes weren't where they
were supposed to be printed."

County spokesman Jim Burrus said the misprinted ballots "added at
least a full day, and maybe two, to the counting process."

But he said it caused serious delays. He said Hart-InterCivic
technicians have never seen this kind of problem before anywhere in
the county.

"This is the only batch of ballots out of the 2.1 million that they've
had a problem with," he said. "Ours is the only one."

Officials at EagleDirect, the company that printed the ballots, did
not return a phone call Friday afternoon. But Burrus said the company
president, Howard Harris, said it will examine unused ballots for the
cause of the problem.

Kostanick also said the county's new vote-counting system itself
"isn't ready for prime time."

Technicians have to wade through a laborious process of computer
clicks and keystrokes -- Kostanick estimates 70 in all -- just to get
through batches of flawless ballots. And when multi-page ballots are
placed in the scanners upside down or out of order, she said,
volunteers have to manually flip through hundreds of pages to put them
back in order.

"Right there, that's a headache," she said. "If you have to find 16
pages out of a stack of 500, you pick a likely place and start
looking, page of ballot by page of ballot. You pull them out, fill out
a tracking form, and do that paperwork."

That's a time-consuming task the system itself should be able to do,
she said, especially since each ballot is printed with a unique serial
number for tracking purposes.

Kostanick also said volunteers and temporary employees often found
themselves idle because the counting process was poorly organized.
Critical questions that volunteers needed to address before they could
continue often took far too long to answer, she said.

"They had just a handful of election staff, and they had so many
crises going on," she said. "Someone would be ready to go, and
couldn't."

Critics who early on protested the county's purchase of the
Hart-InterCivic system said they feel vindicated.

"All we can say is, every attempt was made to prevent the county from
purchasing this system," said Joe Pezzillo, a spokesman for the group
Citizens for Verifiable Voting. "We repeated that vociferously, over
and over."

But Pezzillo said blame for the delays in getting votes counted
shouldn't rest only on the paper-based tallying system.

"In reality, the paper ballot is not the crux of the issue," he said.
"In this case, management is the problem."

Election officials should have noticed, during their testing
procedures, the problems that dragged the counting process out over
days, he said. That didn't happen, he said, because they were busy
trying to get the system up to a basic level of functionality.

"They lost time in dealing with the flaws of this system," he said.
"That's time that should have been spent on planning, logistics and
staff."

County spokesman Burrus said officials developed a plan that they
thought would work, and he said they've been quick to adjust to that
plan's shortcomings by changing their counting methods and bringing in
county employees as staff.

"We're changing all around, trying to find the best combination," he
said. "Did we do it wrong at the beginning? No, we did it the way we
thought was best. Unless there was a known, better way to do something
that we ignored, I don't think you can say we got it wrong."

Whatever the cause of the delay, Sara Mayer of Boulder said it was
dispiriting to the record number of voters who'd been urged to turn
out. Mayer, who worked as a precinct captain for the liberal group
MoveOn.org, said she and other volunteers succeeded in getting nearly
every eligible Democrat and unaffiliated voter on their block to turn
out on Election Day.

"There's the technical reality, and then there's the emotional reality
that it's extremely important to keeping people mobilized and
involved," she said.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Ryan Morgan at morganr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or
(303) 473-1333.

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Picture Caption: 

 Ballot resolution judges Democrat Maggie Sobel, left, and Republican
 Ned Cooney, both of Boulder, look over an improperly marked ballot
 during vote counting at the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder's
 office on Friday.