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Re: vote counting nearly over
Date: Sat. 6 Nov. 2004, 12:30 pm
Group;
The article in the Longmont Times Call of today, is much more
informative about the ballot counting problems, than the Daily Camera.
Citizens are asking for some changes of people working in the County
Clerks office...
I don't have the article handy... on this dial up machine, it takes too
long to find..
Go to www.longmontfyi.com which is the Times Call website, and click on
local news.
Bye, Peter Richards
On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 11:10:45 -0700 Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
writes:
> 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
>
> -------------------
>
>
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.
>
> ---
>
> 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.
>
>
>