Paper Ballots per the Swiss Voting System Method

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Fellow Boulder County Citizens (and Others) Concerned about 
Our Elections:

While I was away recently, I visited with folks from the Swiss Voting 
System company who are trying to package and brand the paper ballot 
methods used in Switzerland for use in other countries.

It's "simple" to implement for precinct and mail ballots, and I have to 
say, I'm very impressed with the methods they use, and am now 
absolutely confident that hand counted paper ballots are an achievable 
reality here -- at a much lower cost than existing paper and electronic 
methods -- with the option of using currency counters for a machine 
count, as well, and with a greatly increased level of voter confidence.

Cost and time estimates are included in the report they have produced 
to explain how to implement their methods which enable the nation of 
about 7 million people to hand count the ballots and cross check the 
totals in a matter of hours, not days. The company sells the report for 
a few hundred dollars and offers implementation consulting and branded 
certification.

The founder of the company, Beat Fehr (cc'd), gave me a copy of the 
report that also includes several styles of sample ballots, including 
one they prepared as an example for Florida. For full disclosure, I'd 
be glad to make money selling this report and/or consulting to 
elections officials and interested citizens and researchers in the US, 
but as of yet, it's still all out of my own pocket.

If people are interested in seeing the materials they provided and an 
explanation of how their paper ballot methods work, please let me know 
and I'll be glad to share what I learned and you can see the sample 
ballots and illustrations. It will only take a few minutes, and I'm 
sure you'll quickly grasp the concept when you see it. How to best 
implement it here may require a little more thought and effort, but I'm 
sure you'll agree that we could find a way to do it and would almost 
certainly see the benefits the first time we do.

If there is enough interest, I'd be glad to do a full public 
presentation, perhaps even to the County Commissioners or other 
interested officials. We've been able to get a room at the Library 
before, I'm sure with enough advance planning we might even be able to 
use the auditorium.

Please don't hesitate to contact me directly, or perhaps the CVV 
mailing list can serve as a scheduling tool if people want to get 
together and discuss this. You can also download the "short form" of 
the report from their website, http://www.swissvs.org

Thanks for your efforts to secure trustworthy elections for Boulder 
County.

Joe Pezzillo, Citizen Activist
Boulder, Colorado USA
jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx