Newly sworn Adams County Clerk Stan Martin is determined to avoid the problems and embarassment his office experienced in November, when the county was the last in the state to report its election results.
The indecision about the victor in Adams County’s closely contested Senate District 24 race .
“Any time you’re feeding ballots one at a time through a scanner and you’ve got 127,000 ballots to put through, you’re going to have problems,” Martin said of the voting machines the county uses.
The Republican clerk, who replaced Democrat Karen Long in January after an eight-year tenure, hopes Adams County becomes one of the first counties in Colorado to pilot Boston-based Clear Ballot’s vote tabulating and auditing system, perhaps as soon as this fall.
He witnessed a demonstration of the company’s equipment and software Thursday evening at the Adams County headquarters building in Brighton.
“I’m trying to identify a system that will meet two of my objectives: transparency and efficiency,” Martin said.
He said one of the big time wasters last fall was the county’s ballot duplication process, in which ballots that didn’t clearly show how voters voted or that contained write-in candidates, had to be inspected manually. He said there were 5,500 such ballots.
Martin estimated that reconciling those ballots required more than 5,300 man-hours and cost the county nearly $60,000.
Clear Ballot reduces the amount of paper handling by scanning ballots once and converting them into electronic pdf documents. Martin is convinced election judges would have an easier time calling up problem ballots and determing voter intent.
“We could put an entire race on the screen for the judges and show them how it was voted down to the last bubble,” he said. “They resolve them all electronically.”
Clear Ballot claims that its software and Fujitsu scanners “can process ballots at a much faster rate than legacy voting systems do.”
“Officials can examine preliminary results, visually verify and adjudicate unreadable ballots, and generate contest reports — all digitally — making it much faster and more efficient,” the company’s website says.
Clear Ballot also claims that because overvotes, undervotes and stray marks can be reviewed right away with its system, expensive recounts can be avoided because stakeholders in an election will be assured that results are accurate.
Colorado Secretary of State spokesman Rich Coolidge said Clear Ballot is on the secretary’s radar .
The company submitted a proposal in December 2013 in response to a request for proposal issued by the secretary of state’s office.
