Citizens ask Boulder County Commissioners to "act to restore public trust"

August 2, 2005 - Boulder County, CO -- To restore public trust in elections County Commissioners were asked to promptly enact the following measures:

1. We request that you fund an independent citizens group to provide continuous oversight of Boulder County’s elections procedures. We request an amount no less than that provided to the ERC, five thousand dollars per annum, and insist that this group be completely independent of the County Clerk’s office, something that cannot be said of the ERC.
2. Second, we reiterate our request that Boulder County provide the citizens an accurate and trustworthy elections system. Only by blatantly ignoring the facts can the Clerk claim that the current system is accurate, and it is clearly not reliable enough to be considered trustworthy.
3. We ask you to resurrect the secret, anonymous ballot cast in our local neighborhood precincts. The last two elections in Boulder County were in violation of the Colorado State Constitution because the ballots were not secret, and there is no indication that the coming election in November will meet this fundamental requirement. We reject the notion that the method of conducting our elections should have the convenience of the clerk and her staff as the primary goal.
4. Further, we insist that the County make NO additional purchases of proprietary elections equipment. In particular, we expect that not another penny of Boulder County taxpayer money will be spent on equipment from Hart Intercivic. We remain shocked and appalled that the County has not asked for nor received a complete refund for the money that has been wasted already.
5. In addition to rejecting proprietary equipment, we also insist that all elections records that can be made public are released as open records in a timely and cost-free manner. It is absolutely unacceptable to be told that our elections records are trade secrets of a private company.
6. We expect that every election held in Boulder County will be thoroughly manually audited by persons not connected with the Clerk’s office who are given complete access to all records needed to verify the counts.
7. Finally, we ask you to embody our requests into law by passing language that would guarantee that Boulder County’s citizens are provided this basic level of accountability over our taxpayer-funded elections.

As a first step toward accomplishing these ends, I return to our request that you act today to fund an independent citizens group and to draft such law as you are able that will protect the vote in Boulder County.

Joe Pezzillo
Boulder, Colorado