Journalists and politicians, Republicans, Democrats and the unaffiliated — all of us share at least one modest goal for the 2012 general election:
Helping Colorado avoid becoming a national laughingstock.
This could be the year Colorado’s nine electoral votes are crucial in the presidential candidates’ drive to 270. I hope not. But if it happens, the state will have to be prepared to let the public see how votes were counted. Legislation now percolating in the Capitol will determine whether that review is calm or chaotic.
I had the privilege and misfortune to have been an editor in Florida in 2000. The St. Petersburg Times asked me to oversee the paper’s participation in a media-driven effort to determine what the outcome of the presidential contest would have been if a statewide recount was not halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Sorry, Democrats: Under any likely scenario, Bush still won.)
From that experience, I learned a couple of things that might be helpful as Colorado lawmakers take up changes to election law in advance of this fall’s election:
1) Have clear, unambiguous statewide standards to govern any recount.
2) Be prepared to have a skeptical public demand to check your work.
On the first count, Colorado seems to be ready — though that certainly won’t preclude clever lawyers from burying the state in lawsuits.
On the second, the state is just getting started.
In 2000, our media group asked to see all the voted ballots that had been cast but not counted. There were 175,010 in all.
Most were ballots where machines had recorded votes in other races but not in the presidential contest (suspicious); some were rejected because machines registered more than one vote for president (clearly not valid, if true).
At the time, Florida had some of the nation’s best laws guaranteeing public access to government documents. (Colorado is North Korea by comparison.) But we were still in uncharted territory, and we negotiated access for the media group county by county. We paid the clerks’ costs.
To avoid a similar post-election circus here, the state’s county clerks have suggested legislation governing citizen ballot reviews in any race, not just presidential. State Sen. Rollie Heath has been working to meet with all interested parties to come up with something that works.
Assuming everyone is interested in both promoting transparency and guaranteeing voter privacy, then the parties should be able to find common ground.
“On the surface, those goals may be conflicting, but I think we can come up with something,” said Heath, D-Boulder.
The clerks’ initial request would create legislation that blocked citizen access to several categories of ballots, each of which contained valid but uncounted votes in 2000. The Colorado clerks wanted to exclude original ballots cast by military or overseas voters and sent by fax or e-mail. They wanted to exclude ballots from any precinct where fewer than 10 ballots were cast by a single particular method, or ballots from any precinct where the votes cast in a race were unanimous.
But these exemptions are unnecessary. If a presidential contest comes down to 20 or 200 votes in Colorado, telling the world that citizens can’t see the ballots from a Baca County precinct because its residents voted unanimously on a sewer bond — well, you can imagine the skit on “Saturday Night Live” now.
Fortunately, there is a way out. If clerks maintain control of the voted ballots at all times but show them to requesting parties, in whatever order the clerk wants, voter anonymity is preserved and we get to verify whether all valid votes were counted. Requesters who want to see, say, more than 100 ballots should be required to pay for the clerk’s actual time in organizing and displaying them.
Activists must forgo the dream of rooting around in a clerk’s files to grab at ballots or conduct perpetual recounts at taxpayer expense. Clerks must accept that a close election will be both unnerving and time-consuming, but the public has rights.
“I think the clerks could work with this,” said Donetta Davidson, executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association, as I uncomfortably straddled the line between columnist and lobbyist on the phone with her. “I’ll see if we can’t come to some agreement.”
It’s a start.
Now let’s talk about improving public access to police reports.
Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.com, or
