Clerk: Scarcity slowed count Salas says space, help shortage hurt ’04 vote

By Brad Turner The Daily Times-Call 2/12/2005

BOULDER — Along with printing errors that tainted ballots, Boulder County Clerk Linda Salas blamed November’s election debacle on a shortage of both volunteers and space for vote-tallying equipment at a Friday hearing.

“A best-case scenario would be more money, more staffing, more room,” Salas told the nine-member Election Review Committee at the Boulder County Courthouse.

Salas and three other elections officials went before the committee, which meets weekly to discuss why officials took more than three days to count ballots using a new voting system that reads results electronically.

In previous hearings, officials said ballots with duplicate serial numbers and smeared bar codes caused the glacial vote count in November. Tallying equipment rejected ballots with tiny imperfections, forcing volunteers to count votes by hand.

On Friday, Salas said she struggled to find enough volunteers to run the tallying equipment and hand-count rejected ballots over three days.

“We had thousands of judges,” she said. “But the problem is, they’re only able to work two hours here or three hours there.”

At times, counting was stalled because there would be too many volunteers from one political party and not enough from another, Salas said. By law, pairs of bipartisan volunteers must tally ballots.

The committee discussed hiking wages for election judges and other temporary workers. At $150 a day, election judges in Boulder County are already the highest paid in the state, Salas said.

That red tape defeats “the easy in-and-out” of hiring temporary workers, committee chairman Richard Lyons said.

Salas said she would like to tally future elections in a building with twice as much room for vote-counting equipment.

The new system, designed by Hart InterCivic in Lafayette, requires a large room to set up equipment. A lack of space for volunteers and scanners had “a huge impact” on the efficiency of the 2004 vote count, Salas said.

The committee will hold its first public hearing at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the commissioners’ chambers. A second public session will likely be held March 3 in Longmont.