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From: AlKolwicz
[mailto:alkolwicz@xxxxxxxxx] http://www.longmontfyi.com/Local-Story.asp?ID=2867
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Date: 7/28/2005 ‘We
will grow,’ Salas vows By
BOULDER — Boulder County elections officials
vowed Wednesday to tweak their procedures in time for the 2006 election,
deliver periodic tallying updates during future contests and ask county
commissioners for more money. “We
will learn, we will teach and we will grow,” County Clerk Linda Salas and
her two top election planners wrote in response to a recent report by the
nine-member Election Review Committee. The ERC
blamed poorly printed ballots and confusion in the elections office for
delaying completion of the ballot count of last November’s elections for
three days. While
Salas and her employees acknowledged some glitches in the November election,
they stressed the accuracy of results tallied on optical scanning equipment
purchased last year for $1.4 million from Hart InterCivic. “The
results of the election were accurate,” Salas and her employees wrote
three times in bold letters. “That singular fact has never been in
dispute.” While
arguing accuracy is far more important than speedy election results, the
officials promised that a clerk’s office employee will be in charge of
posting unofficial vote counts periodically as tallying is completed during
future elections. Salas,
along with deputy clerk Nancy Jo Wurl and election coordinator Josh Liss, also
asked county commissioners to beef up the understaffed elections office, which
has fewer full-time workers than departments in surrounding counties. “We
need more staff to keep up with the changes in election law and growth of The
officials also request more space for equipment storage and Election Day
tallies. The
current Hart system will be used again for the county’s 2005 mail-ballot
election in November. For the
2006 election, however, officials will review procedures for “procurement
of vendors ... election-judge training, testing, staffing, personnel evaluation,
Election Day procedures and post-election procedures and testing,” the
officials said. ERC head
Richard Lyons said his committee’s report was properly interpreted
“as constructive criticism and not as an assignment of fault.” “It
appears that the election division is well on its way to resolving many, if not
all, of the problem areas,” he told the Daily Times-Call in an e-mail. At
several points in their response, Salas and her employees cast partial blame
for the botched 2004 ballot-counting on voting activists who sued the county
shortly before Election Day because they did not trust the Hart system. “The
activists effectively accomplished their goal of hindering the election process
without accepting any responsibilities for the delays they caused,” the
officials wrote. Al
Kolwicz, who attended a public testing session for the new Hart system, called
Salas’s assertions “flat-out untrue,” and said he and other
activists did nothing illegal. Liss, who
was hired by |