Clerk waiting on decertification details

More than a month after Boulder County's voting machines were decertified by the state, Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall is still waiting to get the details about how the machines were tested.

"We still, to date, have not seen the full documentation on the testing and the results," Hall said at a public meeting Thursday night. "It's really frustrating. Before I can really address the issues that have been raised, I need to understand the circumstances that created those issues."

After the ponderous documentation was organized, it had to be sent to Hart InterCivic so the company could request redactions of sensitive information. The requests from Hart have since been sent back to the state, and officials are now deciding whether the information that Hart claims is proprietary actually is.

"At the rate we're going, it's going to be awhile before we're going to get there," Hall told the county commissioners. "We do still have an election in 2008, and we should already be ordering envelopes and looking at what we need by the end of March. ... You can't do any of that without knowing what system you're using."

On Dec. 17, Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified the majority of the state's electronic voting equipment. County clerks across Colorado are scrambling to prepare for November's election.

Many of the public comments Thursday advocated hand-counting the county's paper ballots instead of relying on a machine to scan them.

Computer scientist Neal McBurnett focused his comments on the merits of audits, which he says are essential to voter confidence no matter what system is used.

"The system can't be trusted -- any system," he said.

McBurnett worked with Hall to introduce a more-thorough audit process into the Longmont election held earlier this week.