Garfield County, Colorado, Election Investigation Uncovers Many Miscalculations by Mike McKibbin

Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.

Note: For complete details on this mockery of an election involving incompetence, bungling, nepotism, misuse, and lack of essential technical skills or understanding, see the HAVA report issued April 23, 2004 (PDF) by the Colorado Secretary of State.

[EJF comments in Courier font.]

Tuesday, April 27, 2004, Parachute, Colorado — Ballots in last November's Garfield County general election were incorrectly counted, a Colorado Secretary of State audit found.

A School District 16 mill-levy override of $996,000 passed by a 673-656 count, while a race for a Glenwood Springs City Council seat ended in a 200-200 tie, the audit report said. The new results are not legally binding.

Initial results for the school district question showed it lost by a 625-631 count, while Rick Davis lost his re-election bid in Ward 1 to Larry Beckwith by a 192-189 count.

The lengthy report was released Monday. The audit was conducted by Drew Durham, the director of the federal Help America Vote Act program for Colorado. The program was created after the 2000 presidential voting fiasco in Florida. [And forcing counties to switch to electronic voting machines is clearly leading to even more fiascoes such as this one. See tabulation of Electronic Voting Equipment Problems.]

County Clerk and Recorder Mildred Alsdorf admitted problems occurred in the vote-counting process.

"We had some human errors," she said. "I'll keep better hands-on. This is something that really bothers me."

The district and Davis each asked for an investigation after some irregularities surfaced.

The district paid for a recount of the mill-levy question that reduced the margin of defeat from eight to four votes and included the discovery of 23 uncounted ballots.

Among the problems cited in the report:

• Instructions were sent out with the mail-in ballots that told voters to mark their ballots with pens. The ballots themselves said to use pencils. [Which wouldn't have mattered in the least if the ballots were hand counted, which was eventually required.]

The county's ballot-counting machine can read lead from pencils and some ink if enough lead is included, Alsdorf said. Some ballots filled out with ink were turned over to restitution judges. They covered the ink marks with lead so the ballots could be counted, she said.

• The optical vote-counting machine stopped 1,700 times on election night because of paper jams and programming mistakes. [Operated by the county clerk's son.]

• Inadequate training and supervision of election staff. [Computer technicians are thin on the ground in rural Garfield County.]

• Failure to follow procedures to clear election judges.

• Incorrect segregation of ballots before they were counted.

• Problems with new, first-time-voter-registration procedures.

• At least one elector in Davis' city council ward was given an incorrect ballot. [Wrong ballot style.]

School District 16 officials plan to pursue "all avenues available to us" to "ensure voter intent is implemented."

Superintendent Steve McKee said the district, with schools in Parachute and Battlement Mesa, would seek remedies through the court system and Colorado Legislature.

"We could end up taking one or both steps," he said. "Had this result come about in December, we could have set our mill levy to the correct amount. Now the mill levy is already set, so we may lose one year's funding."

The Help America Vote Act program does not include any penalties, said Secretary of State spokeswoman Lisa Doran. The audit report found no intent by Alsdorf or any of her staff to intentionally alter either outcome. [It is extremely difficult, and often impossible, to distinguish between incompetence and fraud.]

"We're concerned to see that there were these issues, and we hope all the clerks learn from Garfield County's experience," Doran said.

She was not aware of any previous election outcome that was reversed in Colorado in recent years.

Alsdorf said the audit report and school-district-question reversal may hurt the public's confidence in her ability to properly conduct elections.

"I've been doing this since I was elected in 1978, and we've never had a problem like this," she said.

Mike McKibbin can be reached via e-mail at mmckibbin@gjds.com.

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Last updated 6/14/09