The Boulder clerk’s office finished a careful count of 160,000 ballots several days after a glitch in the county’s optical-scan equipment cast doubt on its reliability.
The unofficial results are available online at ., according to a news release by Boulder Clerk Hillary Hall.
Election officials, volunteers and temporary employees began inspecting ballots around the clock on Monday, she said.
Residue in the optical-scan equipment caused the scanners to tally “phantom” votes on parts of the ballot left blank by voters, Hall said.
“Once I realized the scope of this issue on Monday, I decided that we needed to inspect every ballot image to ensure the accuracy of our election results,” she said.
Bipartisan teams inspected more than 400,000 digital images of mail and polling place ballots for streaks and specks that impacted the vote count on some ballots, Hall said.
The phantom votes were easily identified by the human eye and corrected on a computer resolution screen that confirmed the voter’s intent, she said.
Hall’s office will investigate what caused the problem, she said. Elections officials are verifying 2,519 provisional ballots. It must be completed by a Nov. 18 deadline, Hall said.
The official canvass is underway and will be completed by the state’s Nov. 21 deadline, she said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
