Denver still counting ballots

By ANN IMSE
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Denver is still counting votes a week after the election because bar code misprints on 70,000 absentee ballots required five days of hand sorting of 23 ballot styles.

Ballot styles vary because voters live in different legislative and congressional districts. With correct bar codes, scanners would have sorted the different ballot styles automatically as they were counted.

Sequoia Voting Systems misprinted the bar codes and mailed out the absentee ballots directly to voters under a contract with Denver.

The Denver Election Commission learned that the Sequoia scanner could not sort ballots when it tried a test count Oct. 19, election commission executive director John Gaydeski said.

Because the commission had been mailing absentee ballots for nearly two weeks, it decided it would have to hand-sort them.

Gaydeski knew about the problem with the Oct. 19 test but didn't learn that it was because of a Sequoia misprint until Monday afternoon, six days into a vote-count debacle that has left several races undecided.

The mayor's office was not informed, his spokeswoman Lindy Eichenbaum Lent said

Gaydeski found out after the Rocky Mountain News asked him why Jefferson County managed to count 100,000 paper absentee ballots by 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, five and a half hours after polls closed, and Denver is still working on the same job with 70,000 absentees one week later.

Sequoia's vice president of communications, Michelle Shafer, did not return four calls and pages seeking comment.

Gaydeski said that the election commission's now-suspended technology chief, Anthony Rainey, discovered the problem and informed his bosses when he tried to count a test-pack of absentee ballots Oct. 19. Rainey is now on investigative administrative leave.

Rainey was in charge of voter-registration computers that slowed to a crawl on Election Day, causing hours-long lines that prevented a number of citizens from voting.

Another reason for Denver's slow count is the size of its ballot, twice as many pages as Jefferson County's.

The Voting Rights Act requires bilingual ballots if more than 5 percent of the voting-age population speaks another language, so Denver's ballot questions were printed in Spanish and English.

That, and a few more judicial races, made Denver's ballot spill onto two sides of two pages. Jefferson County's English only ballot had only two sides of one page to count.

For five days in Denver, 14 poll workers in a cramped backroom bumped into each other, sorting the first page of each ballot, with candidate names, into 23 boxes in a row against the wall, supervisor John Mills said. The second page had to be sorted into two types.

Many Denver voters also had a hard time following directions for marking their ballots. They used red ink not read by scanners, markers that ran through to the other side, and circled or X'd their choices, instead of drawing a narrow line to connect two arrows, poll workers said. Other voters changed their minds and scribbled their intention or political commentary on the ballot.

As a result, 5 percent or more of the absentee ballots are being transcribed by poll workers onto clean ballots, so they can be scanned by the Sequoia machines.

Some "look like people's pets filled out their ballots," said Rocky Rushing, the commission's staffer in charge of the absentee count.