Almost finished counting
Posted by Richard on November 15, 2006
One week after the election, the Denver Election Commission is almost finished counting ballots. That means we may soon get official results for two state-wide races and a local referendum that have been up in the air.
The referendum is Mayor Hickenlooper’s "kiddie tax" to fund pre-school, about which columnist Peter Blake said, "you know they won’t finish counting until John Hickenlooper’s pre-school tax passes." It looks like Blake was right — it trailed after election day, it continued to trail all week, but lo and behold, as we approach the end of the count, it’s miraculously surged ahead by a thousand votes.
The statewide races are at-large Univ. of Colorado Regent and Secretary of State. Actually, the candidates for the latter didn’t wait for the official results — today, Democrat Ken Gordon conceded to Republican Mike Coffman, and the two pledged to work together to prevent future recurrences of this year’s voting fiascos, of which there were plenty. In Douglas County, the people who stuck it out didn’t finish voting until after midnight. In Denver, the wait was up to five hours because it took poll workers on laptops up to 20 minutes to connect to a central server and validate each voter.
Denver’s counting problems were largely the result of misprinted bar codes on 70,000 absentee ballots, requiring them to be sorted by hand. Pueblo reportedly also isn’t finished counting, but no one there offered an explanation. Denver had a host of other problems, including multiple ballot errors discovered before the election and the incorrect postage amount printed on absentee return envelopes. Then there were thousands of ballots that the Commission said "weren’t filled out right," so they’re being "copied" to new ballots to be scanned. Yeah, right…
Denver’s Clerk and Recorder, who is the appointed member of the three-person election commission, resigned today. He was supposed to be the "technology chief" to guide the two elected commissioners, but it turned out he’d padded his resume.
The ballot errors, bar code problems, and dysfunctional software are all courtesy of Sequoia Voting Systems. Nope, they’re not associated in any way with Diebold. They’re apparently closely connected to the government of Venezuela. That’s right, moonbat conspiracy theorists — if anyone screwed with Colorado’s elections, it was your commie hero, Chavez.
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