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March 20, 2006                 

Boulder County Proposal Evaluation Committee

c/o Shelley Bailey, Assistant County Attorney

RE:  March 15^th demonstration -- observations and recommendations

Please reject the proposal.  The eSlate is innovative and may have future potential.  However, it does not meet the RFP requirements.  It does not meet Colorado Statutes.  It does not meet Boulder County voter requirements for a one ballot per voter – paper ballot system. 

We hope that members of the Proposal Evaluation Committee will examine carefully the recommendations and observations we have documented below as well as the questions and suggestions in our March 13^th letter to the committee.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The proposal must be rejected.  The eSlate does not meet the requirements of the RFP and Colorado Laws.

2. If the committee does not reject the proposal, please restructure the committee to better represent Boulder County voters’ interests.  Add disabled voters.   Add security and systems & procedures experts.  Remove members who are not eligible Boulder County voters.

3. The restructured committee can develop a meaningful proposal evaluation plan, including detailed questions, and invite HART to waive its protection of proposal confidentiality and participate in an open evaluation of the proposal.

4. The committee is advised to investigate reports of eSlate system problems, including Tarrant County, Texas, and Yakima County, Washington.

5. The committee is advised to avoid placing the 2006 elections at risk by accepting this invalid and unpopular proposal.  There is a risk that use of the eSlate could be challenged in a court of law.  Election results might be challenged.

6. It is suspicious that other products were not proposed.  Shouldn’t the committee understand why the Vote-PAD and AutoMARK products were not certified and proposed for evaluation?  These paper ballot products are being used in many states and meet the demand of Boulder County voters for a paper ballot.   They meet more ADA requirements than the eSlate.

The Proposal Evaluation Committee is accountable for evaluating the proposal.  The RFP itself specifies the requirements of the evaluation as follows:

11. Evaluation.

 

The proposals received in response to the RFP will be evaluated considering all factors, including but not limited to: the system’s certification status; the ease of use by voters, including voters with disabilities; ease of use by election judges; the cost of the system; the appropriateness of the system software to the Clerk’s needs; the appropriateness of the system hardware to the Clerk’s needs; the ability of the proposed system to be integrated into the Clerk’s current software environments; the past success of the system in use in other large election jurisdictions comparable to Boulder County ; the quality and cost of vendor system support; vendor qualifications and experience; the financial history and stability of the vendor; the arrangements that vendor must make to have the system manufactured; storage requirements and the need for modifications to accommodate storage; the quality and quantity of staff training, election judge training and community outreach; the quality and extent of the documentation to be provided; the scope and cost of warranty and maintenance. Other factors not listed here may also be considered in evaluating the proposals.

The committee has not met these RFP evaluation requirements.  There is time to do so.

Our conclusions and observations are based on a video recording, and some first hand information provided by public observers.  Both the “formal demonstration” and the hands-on portions of your March 15th meeting were recorded and reviewed. 

Our ability to see and/or hear the equipment, screens, the voter verifiable paper audit trail device (V-VPAT), and controls was minimal to non-existent.  Despite this, we believe that our observations can be helpful to your evaluation of the proposal and are attached.

Also attached, for your ease of reference, are three pages of selected sections of the RFP, the Colorado Constitution, and Colorado Statutes, and a letter from the Secretary of State.

It is vital that the citizens of Boulder County be protected from elections that are not transparent, don’t use anonymous ballots, and are not verifiably secure and accurate.  Boulder County has been burned in the past by misrepresentations of this vendor. 

The Proposal Evaluation Committee has a wonderful opportunity to do more than rubber-stamp a proposal that the committee has not fully evaluated, and that citizens are prohibited from evaluating.

Thank you for your service to the community.

Al Kolwicz

CC:     Linda Salas, Boulder County Clerk
          Boulder County commissioners

Specific observations

1.      The proposal does not meet the legal requirements of the RFP 1.1.

2.      The proposal does not provide the required secret ballot.  The V-VPAT violates Article VII, Section 8 of the Colorado Constitution which requires that “no ballots shall be marked in any way whereby the ballot can be identified as the ballot of the person casting it”.

With eSlate’s V-VPAT, a poll watcher can compile a sequential list of voters who voted at an eSlate.  This list can be combined with the sequential ballots on the V-VPAT “whereby the ballot [on the V-VPAT] can be identified as the ballot of the person casting it “.  HART asserts that they have taken steps to avoid this privacy problem in the way that they store cast records on the disk files.  They obviously understand the problem with sequential cast ballots.
 

3.      The proposal does not permit disabled voters to “review, accept or reject his/her paper record copy privately and independently in an “as normal” as possible method for both disabled and non-disabled voters.”   This is required by CRS 1-5-704(1)(n)(I) and RFP 3.9(4)(g).

For the blind, it is of course impossible to visually read the printed record.  Other equipment meets this requirement with audio playback of the paper record (AutoMARK) or tactile feedback (Vote-PAD).

NOTE:

This same deficiency is the reason that the Secretary of State unreasonably refused to certify the AutoMARK.  See attached January 10, 2006 denial of certification which says:

“Unfortunately at this time we are unable to certify the AutoMARK and AIMS ballot marking devices for use in the State of Colorado as to our knowledge, this type of device does not meet the requirement of Colorado Revised Statutes Title 1, Article 5 Section 704, specifically paragraph (1)(n)(I). “

4.      The eSlate may technically meet the requirements of RFP 3.9(4)(b) and RFP 3.16, it does not ensure that the voter has indeed verified the paper ballot.  One of the public observers, Mary Eberle suggested moving the “cast” function to the V-VPAT.
 

5.      The equipment does not appear to meet Colorado's AUDIT requirements, CRS 1-5-615(1)(p). 

According to one of the public observers, Neal McBurnett, "the Hart system doesn't produce a report that can be audited.  We've reported this many times over the last year for the BallotNow system, and they couldn't provide one for the eSlate system either yesterday.  They say the county must do a recount instead.  But state law specifically requires an audit."

General observations

1.      The committee did not make an effort to “evaluate” whether the proposal meets the requirements, particularly those listed in sections 3 and 4 of the RFP document.  HART controlled the presentation content.  The committee did not control the content.

a)     The presentation addressed almost none of the RFP requirements.

 

b)     The presentation addressed none of the January public comments.

 

c)     Most of what is required to produce a transparent, verifiable, secure and accurate election was not described or discussed at all during the demonstration.  We believe that there are major problems lurking in each of these areas.

2.      No disabled people were present, and no disabled person operated any of the equipment during the demonstration. It is our understanding that the equipment lease is being justified on a perceived requirement to meet the needs of the disabled.  How can the committee know if this requirement is being met without the evaluation by Boulder County disabled voters?  

3.      The committee is not structured to represent the public’s interests.  Major stakeholders have been excluded from the committee and the public has been forbidden to even read the proposal.  They must depend on committee members to represent the interests of the people.  CAMBER provided committee members with a March 13^th list of questions and 36 specific demonstration requirements.  The committee made no attempt to get answers to our questions. 

4.      Committee members could not actually see what the HART demonstration person was actually doing during the “formal demonstration”.  The objective of this demonstration is unclear.

CAMBER is a dedicated group of volunteers who are working to ensure that
every voter gets to vote once, every vote is counted once, and that every ballot is secure and anonymous.
Contact Al Kolwicz at 303-494-1540 or AlKolwicz@qwest.net