Report spreads blame for voting ills
Denver Post. 14 June 2005. By George Merritt, Staff Writer 
 
Boulder County - A committee investigating what went wrong in last November's elections laid blame on a "perfect storm" of problems - from a quagmire of federal and state regulations to voting-machine problems and activist interference.

In all, it took election officials nearly three days to tally votes.

"We wish we could point to one single thing and say that's it," Richard "Dick" Lyons, chair of the Election Review Committee, said in presenting its report to the Boulder County Commission Monday night.

Instead, the nine-member committee spread the blame, on issues ranging from the federal Help America Vote Act to lawsuits over Ralph Nader's place on ballots to a Republican Party representative who, Lyons said, delayed counting on Election Day for nearly eight hours because of questions about accuracy testing on the county's new machines.

"The representative of the Republican Party apparently misunderstood the purpose of the test and tried everything he could to cause the system to fail," Lyons said.

Albin Kolwicz told commissioners that he was the representative in question and was concerned that the committee never contacted him before it issued its report.

But even if everything had gone perfectly, the county's new ballot-counting machines still would have taken 22 hours to get the job done, the report said.

That was a figure that "dumbfounded" Commissioner Tom Mayer, who grilled a representative from the company that makes the machines.

"All I can infer is that Hart (Interactive) did not understand what kind of election we would be running here," he said.

He recalled that before the election there was concern that the county's six new scanning machines would be able to count every vote by 5 a.m or 6 a.m. - and that was a problem.

The county bought two more machines from Hart in hopes of finishing sometime around 3 a.m. He worried that Hart had misrepresented themselves.

"We really take offense to that," said Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman with Hart. The ballot machine "was never represented as something speedy."

But Mayer shot back, "It wasn't represented as being tortoise-like, as it turned out it was."

Shafer said after Monday's meeting that the system was modified to meet a "political climate in Boulder" that demanded a paper trail.

In the end, the committee recommended that the county hold a mail-ballot election this November since the Hart system is best designed for that.