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Re: Boulder County's counting crawls

Thanks to all who have weighed in on the dust issue. Is there a plan to analyze the dust? That would help focus on the exact cause.
Another possible culprit is "paper coating." As paper is manufactured, the surface is often coated with clay, pigment, and binder to achieve sharper printing (http://www.printindustry.com/newsletter_41.htm). It seems useful to determine whether our Boulder County ballots were printed on coated paper and, if so, whether there was anything defective in the coating.
Regardless of the answer to the question of why our ballots are creating dust, we have to ask whether the entire counting system that Boulder County has in place is serving us well. Are we merely playing "whack a mole" by fixing one problem after another, often at great expense and reduction in the public's confidence that our elections are being run properly?
And we must wonder what other counties in Colorado with optical scanning are doing. Are they instituting significant checks and running good audits (not merely recounts on another day) to determine whether, as they hope, their systems worked properly? 

Mary

Mary C. Eberle
1520 Cress Court
Boulder, CO 80304
(303) 442-2164

Lou Puls wrote:
If I may add my modest comments to the ongoing blizzard, I would like to ask WHY the highly informed, sincere, and reasonable CiITIZEN Kolwicz was excluded from the PUBLIC machine- and procedure-testing opportunities?
Also I would like to add an admittedly speculative comment to the discussion of the "paper dust" mystery: Perhaps among those many voters who tried using a felt-tip (black or blue) pen to fill in the boxes, and who found to their horror that the ink bled through to the opposite side of the ballot and decidedly MARKED the other side (foolishly also to be scanned), and who were unwillling or unable to obtain a fresh set of ballots, such voters instead applied some white-out pigment or adhesive bits to the offending bleed-through marks? Have the likely flakes and bits of flotsam resulting from such an ill-advised remediation become what are being termed the mysterious "paper dust"? Even a ball-point pen (black or blue), if not bleeding-through, produces a "looming"-through of a shadow-mark, which a sensitive image scanner could easily acquire, encouraging such a faulty remediation. 

Lou

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Al Kolwicz
    Sent: Nov 6, 2008 11:11 AM
    To: 'Harvie Branscomb' , ColoradoVoter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    Cc: 'Hillary Hall' , 'Margit Johansson' , 'Deb Adams' , 'Geof
    Cahoon' , 'David Larson' , angielayton@xxxxxxxx, 'Ivan Meek' ,
    'joseph richey' , 'Mary Eberle' , 'Cliff West' , 'Tom Morris' , 'Dan
    Leftwich' , 'CFVI Attendees' , 'Citizens for Verifiable Voting' ,
    'erika jensen' , 'Neal McBurnett' , 'Ken Gordon' , 'Morgan Carroll'
    , 'Paul Weissman' , 'Ron Tupa' , 'Teak Simonton' , 'Kathleen Curry'
    , 'Jared Polis' , 'Bill Hobbs' , 'John Kefalas'
    Subject: RE: Boulder County's counting crawls

    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?
[ ... ] 
    ... (Not to sound like sour grapes, I was not permitted to serve.) ...

    [ ... ]

    Al Kolwicz

    *Colorado Voter Group*

    2867 Tincup Circle

    Boulder, CO 80305

    303-494-1540

    AlKolwicz@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:AlKolwicz@xxxxxxxxx>

    www.ColoradoVoterGroup.org <http://www.coloradovotergroup.org/>

    www.coloradovotergroup.blogspot.com
    <http://www.coloradovotergroup.blogspot.com/>



Being ignorant is not such a shame as being unwilling to learn.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758

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