EagleDirect speaks
By RICHARD VALENTY Colorado Daily    31 January 2005

Like the chapters of a mystery novel, each weekly meeting of the Boulder County Election Review Committee develops a new character and new plot movement.

But while this week's main character was ballot printing company EagleDirect, the company set the stage for next week's examination of voting system vendor Hart InterCivic.

The ERC mission is to analyze the 2004 county election process and offer suggestions about how to make sure the county can process the next election quickly and accurately. Past meetings have focused on problems with some of the physical paper ballots supplied by Eagle, but a 54-ballot test run on the county's election system Jan. 20 provided results that are likely to lead ERC members to examine other components of the system.

Eagle CEO Bill Schaefer demonstrated one test ballot that, after being scanned once, was found to have one "damaged race" where the system could not process information for an individual race. The second time through, the system found more damaged races on the same ballot and read another race as an "undervote." The third test read everything on the front page of the ballot properly but one race was rejected on the back page.

"You'd think it would at least show up damaged in the same place," said Schaefer.
 

The Jan. 20 test results showed large-scale inconsistencies in how the system rejects races. According to Eagle, 24 of the 54 ballots were flagged two or three times for different reasons each time. Seven ballots were flagged once but accepted as good twice.

On the positive side, 22 ballots read properly in all three runs through the scanner.

Boulder County election officials resolved (counted or rejected) damaged races manually in the Nov. 2 election, and complete precinct results were not released until Nov. 5 in part due to these delays.

Eagle president Howard Harris and account representative Julie Ellis also attended Friday's meeting. Harris read aloud and provided ERC members with a document of notes from post-election meetings between representatives from Eagle, Hart, Boulder County and Xerox machine technicians.

Harris said County Clerk and Recorder Linda Salas informed Eagle about ballot printing problems Nov. 4. She showed Eagle representatives ballots with under tones, over tones and fuser roller problems. (The fuser roller in a printer permanently fuses toner to the paper.)

Harris also said he saw a stack of ballots "about six inches high" in the Boulder County counting room that were read as having damaged races. He said Tom Halicki, former county elections manager, took the stack to a different scanner that did not read the ballots as damaged.

Harris did not deny Eagle supplied ballots to the county with toner problems, but suggested the "damaged race" problem could have been avoided with better pre-printing communication between Eagle and Hart.

Harris said Hart did not inform Eagle about certain system tolerances until after the election. He said the system would reject races when the boxes on the paper ballot were not within plus-or-minus 20 percent of their expected position.

He also said a Hart official told him the system could have worked using 30 percent tolerances, and Harris said he felt loosening the tolerance could have prevented occurrence of many of the damaged races.

ERC members asked the Eagle contingent if paper stretching during multiple passes through a printer or a scanner could have caused the problems. Also, ERC members asked if the paper could have stretched or shrunk during storage and also asked if Eagle used the proper paper for the job.

Harris said Eagle used the "Cougar Opaque Book 60-pound" paper stock called for by Hart, and that preprinted ballots were stored in Boulder County storage rooms from Oct. 4, the ballot shipping date, until delivery to polling places.

Eagle subcontracted printing a portion of the Boulder County ballots to John-Phillip's Printing Inc. (JPPI), and Harris estimated JPPI printed "50-60 percent" of the county ballots.

Harris said Eagle staff monitored the JPPI operation for quality control, but to date, neither county officials nor Eagle have verified if improperly printed ballots came from Eagle or JPPI machines.

"We suspect most of the anomalies occurred on one machine, but we cannot verify that as a fact," said Harris.

On Friday, an entire meeting will seek to answer questions about the Hart system from ERC, private citizen attendees and possibly a representative from the Secretary of State's office.