Activists want hand-counting for ballots

Proponents say color-coded ballots efficient, cheaper

By Ryan Morgan, Colorado Daily Camera Staff Writer
January 3, 2005

There's a simple cure for what ails Boulder County's delay-plagued vote-counting process, a group of election watchers says: Ditch the machines and count the ballots by hand.

That's a solution that has in the past been dismissed as impractical. But after November's general elections, conducted on a new $1.4 million voting system that was troubled with delays and technical problems, Joe Pezzillo and others are receiving a respectful hearing from city and county officials.

  
"This system is so obvious, and so simple, that it's what we need to restore the confidence that's been lost in our elections this year," Pezzillo said.

He was referring to a vote-counting process designed and sold by a company called Swiss Voting System, based in Basel, Switzerland.

In the Swiss model, separate, color-coded ballots are printed for each race, then sorted by color and hand-counted. Pezzillo said the system is efficient, accurate and relatively inexpensive. And its simplicity is a virtue, he said, because it makes the process's accuracy easier to verify.

"This is something anybody is going to be able to verify," Pezzillo said. "There's no hocus-pocus, no black box. Everything's in plain view."

Election watchdogs use the term "black box" to refer to voting systems in which the tabulation or sorting of ballots is conducted by a computer program whose source code isn't publicly available because it belongs to a private vendor.

Beat Fehr, a representative from Swiss Voting System, will be in Boulder this week to explain the system, Pezzillo said. Fehr will speak at a public meeting tonight.

Pezzillo and other advocates of the Swiss Voting System process said they had hoped the city of Boulder would use it in the March election to replace outgoing City Councilman Will Toor. City officials balked at that suggestion because they said they wouldn't have enough time to learn an entirely new system.

But that doesn't mean it's not a possibility further down the road. City Councilwoman Crystal Gray, who met with Pezzillo to see a brief demonstration of the system last week, said she was impressed with what she saw.

"I don't think it's pie in the sky," she said. "A lot of smaller communities use this. When you sit down and look at it, it's really logical."

Gray and other City Council members have asked City Clerk and Recorder Alisa Lewis to examine the system and, at some point, deliver her take on whether it could work for Boulder.

Lewis said she'll need a much more extensive look at the system before she'll feel comfortable assessing its merits. She noted that because Boulder usually has to coordinate its elections with Boulder County, switching systems isn't something the city can leap into alone.

But, she said, "I certainly found many aspects of the system that were very interesting and worth taking a look at."