Boulder County voters can't vote in national elections. Not as long as we use the Hart/InterCivic Ballot Now system. So many of us wanted paper ballots. Few wanted electronic methods. Paper ballots seemed to be so secure, while elections by computer has been proven in so many ways to be insecure. Okay, so the county government listened to the demands of the voters and purchased a new paper system. Its really a computer system, but it deals with paper ballots.

Then came the 2004 general election, which took 63 hours to tally. More than two days to come to any sort of conclusion. We know that we held up the state in elections reporting. Everyone wanted to know why? The ballots were screwed up and the scanners had trouble reading them. That's why. A six month study of the cause was described as a virtual train wreck. Everything that could go wrong did. No one expected what happened and the procedures didn't cover bad ballots.

We had four years of practice with new staff and various technological fixes. Since the ballots were still paper it might have been assumed that they could be counted by hand, if the train left the tracks again.

In 07 the Secretary of State de-certified the paper ballot system that we have. The marks on the ballots used by the computerized scanning system violates the state constitution. There were many reasons to replace the Hart system, but it wasn't replaced. More money and time was spent on fixing this thing that doesn't work very well. Boulder County had spent nearly $4M on the hardware and who knows how much on the labor to support its failures.

In our recent general election, county voters were only able to vote on local issues and candidates. Our votes for federal offices didn't really count. Our votes for president weren't included in the final tally with the rest of Colorado. They were still being counted until last week. More massive failures, higher labor costs and a technological nightmare.

Who could know? It's been the hue and cry of our local government leaders. More time and money will be spent to figure out what to do before the next election. How about replacing it with a paper ballot system that can read ballots without breaking the law or employing a huge squad of fixers? That's too simple and too inexpensive, and way too obvious.

For the next four years we'll get to practice getting right, just like we did between 04 and 08. Do other counties need to practice to get it right? Why do we care what the other 63 counties are doing? Well, we certainly can take their elections as an example. They got to vote for president and US senate. We didn't.