County officials learn the hard way, electronic voting?s day has arrived

The day after the presidential election, Austin, Texas-based Hart InterCivic issued a press release praising how its new eSlate Electronic Voting System has been used successfully by customers in nine states.

One of the customers was Harris County, Texas, the nation?s third-largest county with 1.9 million registered voters.

Days after the company?s boast, voters in Boulder County, including myself, were still waiting for our election results.

Re-elected President George Bush already was shuffling his new cabinet, beaming Democrats had elected a new speaker in the Colorado House, and strategists were enamored with the GOP?s ability to woo evangelical Christians.

All this while Boulder County?s election officials only could keep counting and looking for excuses.
I won?t be the first nor will I be the last to say our voting system turned out to be a cruel travesty.

For a county that prides itself as home to technology companies, we found ourselves stuck with a $1.2 million voting system that was an absolute joke. Not only was it a national PR black eye, the agonizing slow count angered citizens who felt left out as the rest of the country celebrated or bemoaned the elections.

?We?re on the steep part of a learning curve,? county spokesman Jim Burrus said in an understatement the day after the vote. ?It was a trial by fire.?

Fact is, for an election with a heavy turnout, the Ballot Now system would make pretty good firewood ? and you could stack it in the oversized ballot boxes needed for those huge ballots, which would make excellent kindling.

Here are the facts:
? The Ballot Now paper system was designed to count absentee ballots, even though it was used, with slow results, in California?s gubernatorial recall election. ?Instead of just using it for absentees, we purchased that system for our entire system,? Burrus confirmed. ?We?re the only county in Colorado that has a paper-based, optical scan system like this.?

? Hart InterCivic, which has developers based in Lafayette, tried hard to sell the county its new eSlate electronic voting system.

? Vocal citizens groups fought against the electronic system because it lacked a paper trail. The technology is unproven, they argued. On and on.

Here?s how Burrus put it: ?When you choose a low-tech option because you are afraid of the technology basically ? this is what you get.?

Even the Daily Camera editorialized in April that the system bought by the county ?is an improvement over the diret-record electronic systems the county seemed enamored of last year.? Now the newspaper is blaming ?management, not system? for the ?election fiasco,? saying the system could have worked with better hardware and staff training.

? The printing of the ballots, which was done locally, is the latest in an already long list of what went wrong.

? Finally, when all else fails, don?t forget to blame human error. Give anyone a black pen and tell them to fill in a box, and sure enough, somebody will make an X or write in Donald Duck?s name. As I was talking to Burrus, he said a ballot was being examined because it had George McGovern as a write-in for U.S. senator.

The finger-pointing will continue well past my deadline for this column. Glum faces all around. Especially County Clerk Linda Salas.

One more fact:
? Electronic voting systems around the country performed very well. Diebold, another maker of electronic voting systems, saw its stock take a nice jump.

Outgoing county commissioner Ron Stewart, one of the three who OK?d spending the money for the paper system, clearly was not happy.

?The clerk created a committee to look at what kind of system would be bought, and it came to the commissioners really only in the sense that we needed to appropriate money in order to buy it.

?Frankly, if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn?t have gone this way,? Stewart admitted.
I don?t think I?m going out on the limb to predict the Ballot Now system is pretty much Ballot History. What we now have is an expensive system to count absentees.

It?s easy to mistrust technology. Everyone with a computer knows the word reboot.

But of all places, bullied Boulder County officials should have trusted their instincts and purchased the high-tech system, especially one developed right here. I?m sure every one of the system critics has no qualms about swiping their ATM card to deposit their paychecks.

By the next election, we?ll be voting electronically. It may include paper receipts of the votes. In the interim, more committees will be formed. And new commissioners get the fun job of figuring out how to pay for it.

But next time, our votes will be tallied quickly and accurately because as we all now know, the technology already works.

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