A panel charged with fixing Colorado's election system voted Tuesday to support a recommendation requiring the state to hold all-paper-ballot elections starting in 2014, but one commission member compared the recommendation to being held hostage.
The recommendation, which the legislature can choose whether to adopt, urges Colorado to use only paper ballots starting in 2014. Until then, though, the recommendation proposes allowing clerks to continue using their electronic voting terminals without having to get them recertified or have a paper trail that voters can see.
Those two requirements were pressing down on clerks across Colorado, as a bill from last year that provided a one-time fix to certification headaches is set to expire this summer. If the legislature doesn't pass another certification fix this session, more than 50 Colorado counties will be stuck with costly voting equipment they can't use.
"I feel it's giving some people some things and giving other people some things," said former Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, a Denver Democrat who is chairman of the state's Election Reform Commission. "It's a carefully worked-out balance that involves the equitable distribution of unhappiness."
But critics of the proposal said it amounted to "ramrodding" a paper- ballot mandate through the commission by tying it to the voting-machine certification fix.
"This recommendation should be viewed with immense skepticism," commission member Scott Gessler, a Republican elections attorney, said afterward. "It's a classic case of logrolling in a commission."
The debate goes back several years, when voting activists sued the state over its certification procedures for electronic voting machines. Activists say the machines are prone to error, but clerks vigorously defend the terminals, saying they are reliable.