This article was originally published in The Denver Post on Dec. 19, 2007.
Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman on Tuesday asked the state legislature to streamline rules so he can help counties fix problems with electronic voting machines before the primary and presidential elections.
After his report Monday detailing flaws in many of the machines used in the state, Coffman said he needs state rules eased so he can move quickly to bring them into compliance.
“We need to hold a 2008 presidential election,” Coffman said. “Following the inflexible bureaucratic process is not going to get us there.”
Coffman told legislators that the problems may be dealt with quickly using new software and new procedures. But before that can happen, the state must relax some strict rules and streamline the certification of voting machines.
Still, Coffman’s analysis of the problem and his proposed solution met immediate resistance from some lawmakers, voting-rights advocates, machine manufacturers, and counties that have relied on them to run elections.
“What he’s proposing to do is to put duct tape on the Titanic,” said Paul Hultin, lead lawyer in a lawsuit that forced an overhaul of the state’s voting-machine certification process.
State Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, a Denver Democrat, said he might prefer a new system that would emphasize paper balloting over electronic voting.
“The bell has been rung on electronic voting machines,” Gordon said. “The legislature may consider possible solutions that don’t use electronic voting machines or minimize their use.”
Coffman’s office, however, on Monday decertified two of the four brands of optical scanners used to count paper ballots.
Gordon is co-chair of the Certification Task Force along with state Rep. David Balmer, a Republican from Centennial.
Coffman spoke to the task force a day after he announced he had decertified machines by three of four manufacturers used in the state — Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, and Election Systems and Software, or ES&S.
The only machines approved are made by Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems.
Coffman said during a meeting with the editorial board of The Denver Post that he believed some systems still “would stand a good chance of passage” if the legislature eases rules guiding the certification process.
While Hultin said he was concerned Coffman’s effort to loosen state regulations would erode safeguards, others complained the state had become too stringent.
Deb Green, president of the Colorado County Clerks Association, issued a statement saying the state’s clerks “currently operate under the most stringent audit and testing regulations in the United States.”
Coffman said that for one vendor’s system — Hart’s optical scanners that read paper ballots — a solution could be to alter current state laws to allow upgraded versions of its software that have passed tests elsewhere.
Hart is skeptical of the tests conducted on its equipment in Colorado, said Peter Lichtenheld, director of marketing for the Austin, Texas-based company.
Coffman said that in California, Hart made an upgrade that satisfied state officials’ concerns about the company’s optical scanners.
Fixing Hart’s problems would go a long way toward smoothing the path to the 2008 elections.
That firm’s machinery is used by 47 counties in the state, Coffman said.
A simple software patch may be able to fix a glitch in Sequoia’s electronic voting system, which is used in Denver, Coffman said.
There is currently no way to ensure the paper that creates an audit trail on Sequoia machines is installed properly without an actual vote being taken.
That creates a dilemma for clerks who aren’t allowed to vote and aren’t allowed to see how a citizen votes, Coffman said.
As for ES&S machines in use in Mesa and Jefferson counties, Coffman said he thinks county clerks may have a better chance at passing programming tests than the vendor who failed. But state law doesn’t currently allow local officials to do the testing. That also should change, Coffman said.
Election officials in Mesa and Jefferson counties, maintained there are no problems with their systems.
“We’ve had nothing but successful elections with this equipment,” said Janice Rich, Mesa County clerk and recorder. “Isn’t it a shame that our own Secretary of State has gone down a path that will punish counties with successful elections?”
Jefferson County elections deputy Josh Liss said: “We know our system works, and we know how to make it work.”
Since 2002, Jefferson County’s 347,000 voters have cast votes on ES&S machines, he said.
Although Coffman’s office did certify the Premier machines, Hultin said that both Ohio and California officials found the company’s technology vulnerable to hackers.
Even in Coffman’s study, Premier machines failed functional tests 11 percent of the time, and documentation was inadequate 22 percent of the time.
Hultin said he would prefer that Colorado move toward a system similar to New Mexico’s, which uses paper balloting at polling places. To address accessibility issues, the disabled there are given specialized equipment that helps them mark their paper ballots, he said.
New Mexico uses optical scanners to tally votes and then rechecks a random sample of the scanned ballots for accuracy.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
What Coffman wants the legislature to allow:
• Machine upgrades to be certified separately, without requiring a complete new round of testing of all machine components.
• The use of testing data from California, which would establish the viability of some machine upgrades.
• The bypassing of federal certification of some machine upgrades, cutting the amount of time needed to get the current machines certified for August’s primary.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it incorrectly spelled the name of Assistant House Majority Leader David Balmer.
