Council vote will undergo ballot audit

Hand-count of up to 700 mail-in votes planned

By Ryan Morgan, Boulder Daily Camera Staff Writer
March 3, 2005

The city of Boulder will hand-count a sample of ballots following the March 8 mail-ballot election to make sure its count matches the one produced by Boulder County's electronic voting equipment, City Clerk Alisa Lewis said Wednesday.

Lewis had been negotiating with the Colorado Secretary of State's Office, the state's top election authority, to get approval for the post-election audit. That approval came Wednesday.   
 
The city doesn't have its own election equipment and uses county staff and equipment to conduct its election. Many people had worried that the same glitches that beset the county's equipment during November's general election could return in this election, being held to replace former Boulder City Councilman Will Toor.

"I'm very specifically doing it because there have been so many concerns raised," Lewis said. "There's absolutely no reason for us not to take every step possible to reassure all of the parties, for all of us to make sure the system is working accurately."

Neal McBurnett, an unofficial election watchdog, said he'd like to see more improvements made in the software of the system the county uses. But he said the hand-count audit is a good start.

"It's a really big step," he said.

Lewis said election workers will hand-count between 600 and 700 ballots.

Voters so far have mailed in about 8,000 ballots out of the 58,000 that were sent out, Lewis said. The ballots have been scanned, but election workers won't start to tally them until 7 p.m. Tuesday.

So far, Lewis said, things have been going smoothly ? despite the efforts by some voters to try to test or fool, the system.

"We had one ballot where someone whited out the bar code, and we had to create a duplicate," she said. "We had one that has a very obvious coffee stain all over the front of the ballot."

Election workers also spotted a ballot that wasn't an original, but a photocopy. Lewis said she will turn it over to the District Attorney's Office. Lewis said the photocopy ? a black and white copy of a color ballot ? was so poorly made that she doubts it was intended for fraudulent purposes. She thinks a voter just wanted his or her own copy, and mailed the wrong version in by mistake.

"Either that, or someone was trying to see if we'd catch it," she said.