County holds mock election
By RICHARD VALENTY Colorado Daily Staff Writer

Many Boulder County citizens might not think about voting systems until closer to the November presidential election, but for county election officials, time is of the essence in making sure a brand new county voting system works efficiently and to perfection.

In the spring of 2004, the Board of Boulder County Commissioners approved a purchase of the "BallotNow" software system from vendor Hart InterCivic, a Texas-based company with an operations facility in Lafayette, Colo. The Hart system replaces a punch-card voting system, the Sequoia "Data Vote," that was in use for nearly 30 years and last used in the 2002 election.

On Thursday, county and Hart officials gave the new system a test run in a "mock election" where people filled in about 3,000 fake ballots. There were no Pete Coors vs. Bob Schaffer or Mike Miles vs. Ken Salazar contests on the ballots, only questions such as "Which animal should be the Boulder County mascot?" or "Should public school students have a dress code?'

The mock election, then, was less about election results and more about functionality of the system and how to resolve questionable voting situations.

In 2004, county voters will fill out paper ballots with ink pens, and the ballots will be fed into high-speed scanners that will capture a digital image of the actual ballot. On Thursday, county officials began the test by feeding 40 two-sided ballots into a scanner, which finished recording the images in about 20 seconds.

Some of the "voters" intentionally filled out the ballots incorrectly - for example, voting for two choices when only one is called for, creating an "overvote" situation. Also, some voters filled in write-in choices, undervotes or even deliberately sloppy ballot markings to test how the Hart system would handle problem ballots.

The Hart system is designed to "flag" individual ballots with discrepancies. Election officials will then call up the digital image of the ballot and project that image on a wall, so election judges and citizen poll watchers can see the ballot in question. The entire section of the ballot with a discrepancy is color-coded, for example, overvotes in orange, for quick identification.

While the ballot image is on the wall, judges will confer to determine voter intent. Also, workers can "blow up" a projected image to a larger size in case a marking or a write-in choice is difficult to read.

Election officials will then either disqualify the portion of the ballot with a discrepancy or determine how the voter actually intended to vote. After the batch of 40 ballots was evaluated Thursday, officials prepared a "resolution report" so they could double-check that all discrepancies were cleared.

Ballot information would then be stored on a memory card called "Mobile Ballot Box," and Hart software called "Tally" performs vote tabulation.

The mock election was largely a test run for county judges/officials and Hart employees, but citizen computer programmer Paul Walmsley attended Thursday to propose and evaluate options for manual ballot recounts, in case electronic tabulation results seem questionable. Due to state law, orders for a manual recount of the paper ballots would have to come from the Secretary of State.

Walmsley asked Hart officials if BallotNow could produce a spreadsheet that showed the individual ballot number and the voter choice on each ballot contest in a line, for example, "Jimi Hendrix" for president, or "yes" on the "free pizza for life" initiative.

According to Walmsley, this would give recount workers an efficient way to double-check that votes were tabulated exactly as they were cast. Also, Walmsley said the Hart system could then provide a third level of protection, against someone altering the original paper ballot during a recount, since a digital image of the original is stored.

Late Thursday afternoon, officials were still working on the 3,000 fake ballots. Many questions were asked during the process, but Eddie Perez, Hart training specialist, said he thought county trainees were "competent and confident in the use of the system."

Perez led a group of six election judges through an early-morning training session Thursday, and county officials were setting up seats for a massive judge training session late Thursday afternoon, with little time to spare before actual election action.

Early voting for the August 10 primary begins July 31, from 10 a.m.-2 p.m., and continues Aug. 2-6 from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Also, officials must receive written applications for absentee primary ballots by Aug. 3.