Caldara: Want to know how I voted? Look it up

By Jon Caldara in the Boulder Daily News  

August 15, 2004

Government employees have better things to do than spend their valuable time trying to appease the occasional gadfly who starts circling around their offices.

Take for example Boulder busybody Al Kolwicz. For years he has been pestering election officials from Boulder County to the Colorado Secretary of State's office. He's constantly yapping that our voting systems are not secret, verifiable or accurate.

This guy is so annoying that the folks at Boulder County Clerk's office ordered him off their premises during a mandated test of our new voting equipment and tried to have him arrested on Aug. 5.

But you do have to give Kolwicz credit on just one tiny little point: He's absolutely right.

Our voting systems are not secret or verifiable, and who knows if they're accurate. Kolwicz was tossed out during the accuracy test because he had the gall to fill out the test ballots with the kind of mistakes real voters make.

Boulder County had a relative good voting system for years, with the glaring exception of mail-in ballots, where hundreds went uncounted.

We had those great, old-fashioned punch cards that used that sliding hole puncher. If you read this column, chances are you vote and know exactly what I'm talking about — no hanging chads, easy for manual hand recounts, of which there have been a few.

But after "Florida," Congress ordered counties to get rid of punch-card systems. And, with our own ballot counting machines in need of repair, it was time for Boulder to buy a new, and of course, expensive, system.

I got a taste of that system when I voted in the Aug. 10 primary. Due to a new law I had to show identification before voting. Even though old movie stubs and laundry tickets can apparently pass for ID, this is a huge step forward for voting integrity.

But was it a secret ballot? If you really want to know how I voted, you can check it out for yourself. For the first time in my life, I turned in a ballot with a serial number on it: 00733454. Anyone with access to the ballots can now go see how I voted.

While our old ballots also had serial numbers, that portion was torn off before the ballot went into the locked box. Not so with the new ballots. To my knowledge, Boulder is the only county in the state that individually marks ballots.

Secret and private ballots are a cornerstone of democracy. It is even spelled out in Article 7, Section 8 of the Colorado Constitution: "no ballots shall be marked in any way whereby the ballot can be identified as the ballot of the person casting it."

Did I mention my ballot was marked with number 00733454? I am now identified as the person who cast it.

The county clerk's response to this issue is, don't worry, the Secretary of State's office says what we're doing is OK, and nobody at the polling place would ever write down your serial number. In other words, we don't need secret ballots in Boulder, you can trust us.

I prefer the old Reagan standard: Trust, but verify.

It is not just election workers that have access to ballot serial numbers; it can be the voters themselves. What better way to prove to your union boss or Halliburton connection that you voted the way they instructed than giving them your ballot number to have some insider check it?

The other big problem with the new system is accuracy. Like those old "Scantron" tests we took in high school, you now need to scribble in the little square with a pen without going outside the lines. (So much for that Boulder "color outside the lines" attitude.)

What if you do go outside the lines, or don't fill it in completely? Well, you just hope the machine guesses how you wanted to vote correctly. We don't know that it will. When Kolwicz tried to challenge the system that way during a test, he was kicked out. How dare he color outside the lines?

If the machine can't guess how you voted, then election officials get to "interpret" how you meant to vote.

Instead of getting hassled by election workers and belittled by officials, Al Kolwicz should be thanked by all voters for his determined, relentless and detailed work to demand that voting be truly secret, accurate and verifiable.

And the county needs to give us a new, Kolwicz-approved paper ballot system.