DENVER—A new commission charged with reviewing how Colorado runs elections will look at whether the state should rely more on paper ballots than electronic voting machines, and whether the state should move toward all-mail elections.
The Election Reform Commission, which met for the first time Wednesday, will also consider stronger postelection audits to double-check the accuracy of vote counts and how voters are canceled from the new statewide database, the subject of a lawsuit the week before Election Day.
The 11-member group is composed of county clerks, election lawyers, a computer security expert and Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, the group’s chairman. Five are Republicans, five are Democrats and one is unaffiliated. It is expected to make recommendations by March so lawmakers can make changes in time for the 2010 election.
The Legislature created the commission last year amid confusion and doubts about the accuracy of electronic voting.
The majority of county clerks fought an effort to switch to a mainly paper ballot election in the middle of their planning for the presidential election, so lawmakers stuck with the current system, which allows each county to decide its own voting system. Federal law requires there be at least one electronic voting machine at every polling place but all but 10 counties decided to either rely mainly on paper ballots or offer voters a choice.
Gordon has been critical of electronic voting machines. So has another panel member, attorney Paul Hultin, who represented voters who tried to stop the use of the machines in 2006. Hultin said he thinks paper ballots that can be optically scanned is a “happy marriage” of technology and reliability.
Commission member Mark Baisley, president and CEO of the information security firm Slip Glass, said he has voted on electronic voting machines and thinks they can be trusted with proper security.
However, his work trying to stop hackers from getting access to online banking transactions and orders to soldiers in the field still makes him skeptical of whether voting machines always work as they should.
“We should always have the jaundiced view of this, especially with systems like this that determine our history,” he said.
Last week, Boulder County discovered that its Hart InterCivic scanners were counting black specks on paper ballots as votes. There was also extra print that may have rubbed off from other ballots that were counted as votes.
Boulder clerk Hillary Hall, who is not on the commission, said those ballots had to be inspected individually on the scanner’s screen, delaying the county’s election results until Friday.
She didn’t think the current audit standards would have picked up the problem because only one scanner and up to 1,000 ballots would have been counted. Hall said she hasn’t figured out yet whether the problems were caused by a problem at the printers, in the mail or other reasons.
Voting activists told commissioners they believed the same problem could happen in other counties that use the same kind of printer, which Hall said is used in about 50 of the state’s 64 counties.
Several clerks on the panel pointed to the fact that about half of Colorado voters voted by mail this year as a reason to look at an all-mail election. Larimer County clerk Scott Doyle also said that Oregon had eight ballot questions when it switched to an all-mail election while Colorado had 14 this year.
Also on the commission are clerks Stephanie O’Malley of Denver County, Patti Nickell of Bent County, Bob Balink of El Paso County and Sally Misare of Castle Rock, deputy secretary of state Bill Hobbs and lawyers Scott Gessler and Scott Martinez.
Voter registration became an issue in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election. Voter advocacy groups sued Secretary of State Mike Coffman, alleging county clerks illegally purged 27,000 names too close to the primary and general elections.
This week, Coffman’s office said that the actual total of names purged between May 14 and Election Day was 44,000 but that most were duplicates or voters who had moved.
State officials had to compile the list under a deal reached with the groups to help ensure that anyone who was wrongly purged was able to cast a provisional ballot.
The Denver Post reported Wednesday that a survey of several county clerks showed several hundred people whose registrations were canceled had to cast provisional ballots. No official count will be available until next week.
