Coming one year after the frenzied, record-busting turnout of the 2008 election, this year’s election might feel a little quaint.
Less Super Bowl, more super lull.
And indeed, amid middling turnout so far, most county clerks are reporting few troubles with this year’s mail ballot-only election.
“It’s a little quiet this year, especially in comparison,” said Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson. “The ballots are coming in slow but steady.”
But also county clerks around the state are using the lessons learned from last year to make this year run more smoothly.
Take Boulder County. In 2008, dusty ballots — and the speckled images they produced when scanned by automated vote-counters — ground counting to a near standstill, delaying a final tally for four days.
Computer glitch at fault
After months of follow-up testing, county officials determined that a computer glitch — a malfunctioning driver file — caused the scanners to read incidental blips they should have ignored.
“The machine wasn’t removing minor imperfections it should have been removing,” said Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall.
With that fixed, Hall said ballot images are “cleaner” and easier for the machines to read.
The county also has redesigned its ballot — paying closer attention to where the mailing folds hit, for instance — so that ballots run through the scanners more smoothly.
In Denver — where thousands of voters last year complained that their mail-in ballots never arrived — elections officials have unveiled a unique-in-the-nation program for voters to track their ballots from the time they hit the central mail-sorting facility to when they arrive in their mailboxes to when they get counted at the clerk’s office.
The program, called Ballot TRACE, sends e-mail or text-message updates to voters on their ballot’s progress and is in the testing phase for this election.
Denver Clerk Stephanie O’Malley hopes to make it available to everybody in 2010. Michael Scarpello, Denver’s elections director, said the program also helps the clerk’s office hold other links in the chain — like the post office or the ballot printer — accountable.
“Previously, (ballots) would go into the system and that’s about all we knew,” Scarpello said. “Now, we can follow each piece every step of the way.”
Tracking system eases worries
Denver resident Carol Tone, who works with the League of Women Voters, told O’Malley at a public forum last week that Ballot TRACE gave her the confidence to vote by mail.
“As one individual who has been uneasy about the prospect of mailing back my ballot, I no longer seem to have that anxiety,” Tone said.
Last year’s election — when more than 60 percent of voters cast their ballot by mail — also forced clerks to make their mail ballot-counting process more efficient or increase their number of vote-counting teams. Some have carried those preparations over to this year.
“We geared up to count more ballots this year in hopes that we would have a bigger return than we are,” said Adams County Clerk Karen Long.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
