Printer says ballots bear partial blame

Maintains most of fault lies with the new voting system

By Eric Bontrager, For the Boulder Daily Camera
January 29, 2005

The printer of the ballots from Boulder County's botched November election admitted Friday that printing errors caused some problems, but said the company that makes the county's new voting system and its machines carry the bulk of the blame.

In addition, Howard Harris, president of EagleDirect printing, said Hart InterCivic Inc., the company that manufactured the county's new voting system, has been uncooperative in helping his firm uncover problems since the election.  
"This was unlike any other order we have ever had," Harris told the county's Election Review Committee Friday. The committee is investigating what caused the vote count to take a week to complete.

A company official from Hart InterCivic Inc. also attended the meeting, but said little in defense of the firm.

Hart InterCivic Inc. is expected to make its presentation to the committee Friday.

Harris and others from EagleDirect presented a report to the committee documenting their role in the investigation following the election, including several conversations with engineers and technicians from Hart InterCivic Inc.

According to Harris, EagleDirect first became aware of a problem two days after the election when the printing on some ballots appeared too light, too dark or was smudged.

While those printing errors were obvious, many ballots were rejected by the machines as damaged initially for unclear reasons, he said. Harris said that after further review, it was determined the location of the boxes voters filled in was off slightly on these damaged ballots.

Quoting a Hart engineer, Harris explained that the Hart voting systems has a tolerance of plus or minus 20 percent, meaning the ballot scanner could compensate for movement of the boxes by no more than 20 percent, a tolerance Harris characterized as unreasonable.

"The great majority of ballots rejected could have been read if the tolerances were loosened," he said.

Presenting a collection of 54 ballots from the election that were tested three times on the county's system earlier this month, EagleDirect's chief operating officer Bill Schaefer said the Hart system's tolerance was so tight that 32 ballots were rejected in one or more scans. Of those 32, 24 were rejected because of defects that appeared on different locations on the ballot after each scan.

Schaefer said EagleDirect's quality control for the ballots was hindered because, unlike past printing jobs EagleDirect has done, Hart would not supply one of its machines during the printing process.

He also said throughout the post-election investigation, Hart has failed to provide EagleDirect with any of it's machine's specifications for printing.

Schaefer explained that a "bubble effect" of magnification produced by the Xerox machines EagleDirect used to print the ballots may have been responsible for some of the boxes not being printed within Hart's specifications.

"We're led to believe by Hart that printing anomalies could have been corrected by the machines," he said.

Neil McClure, vice president for Hart's election solutions group, told the committee during the public comments part of the meeting that that kind of movement of the boxes should not have been happening.

"According to Xerox, there should be no deviation," McClure said.

He did not comment further on Friday.

Committee members said that though printing and machine errors may have played a part in the ballot counting delay, there also are other factors to consider. For example, committee member Linda Flack said some of the election volunteers walked off the job before the count was complete.

Committee chairman Richard Lyons said he hopes public testimony at a future special meeting will expose yet-to-be-discovered contributing factors.

"It may be the perfect storm of issues that caused the delay," he said.