RE: Boulder County's counting crawls

["Al Kolwicz" <alkolwicz@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Harvie,

 

I have a different take on your question, ?Why hasn?t Boulder County Clerk
Hillary Hall heard about dust problems on her Hart Scanners?  I would
suggest that the reason is that there is no mechanism for this kind of
problem sharing to take place.?

 

1.       The problem of spurious marks was detected by the State?s Voting
System Certification Team.  A CONDITION OF USE was set up that would require
special manual pre-scanning treatment of all HART paper ballots.  At a
hearing, we attempted to protect this condition.  However, the powerful,
secret, Colorado County Clerks Association lobbied, using incomplete and
erroneous arguments, to protect the vendor and themselves from this
condition of use.   They persuaded the SOS to remove the condition of use.

 

2.      The architecture of all paper ballot vote counting systems certified
in Colorado is fatally flawed.  None of these systems provide exports of the
ballot images and the interpretation of each vote on each individual ballot.
Consequently, independent verification of vote interpretation is not
possible ? not even by the Canvass Boards.

 

3.      The LAT is contrived and inadequate.  The procedures and materials
are idealized, and not at all representative of the real world.  And, in the
case of Boulder County, the Clerk contrived to exclude the people most
knowledgeable of the HART system from serving on the LAT team.  (Not to
sound like sour grapes, I was not permitted to serve.)

 

4.      Despite repeated requests that officials follow Colorado Statutes
and Rules, the County and the State have neglected to perform ?acceptance
Tests? of the voting system.  The system test would include ballot
printers/vendors as well as every other component/subsystem.