When Aurora voters who live north of Colfax cast their ballots next week, those ballots will be counted with machines that may become the standard in Colorado.
Adams County is one of eight counties around the state testing four new voting machines, one of which could be selected to eventually replace the state’s aging voting systems.
A Front Range county has been paired with a rural county to use the same systems. Adams County is trying out the same system as Gilpin County.
Adams County Clerk and Recorder Stan Martin said the system isn’t just the machines voters use, but it also designs the ballots and counts them.
“It’s not so much the voting machines out there in our sites; really, what it is is a complete voting system,” he said.
The Secretary of State plans to certify one new voting machine next year, putting the state on track to move away from a patchwork of voting machines to a single system.
“Much of our equipment in Colorado is old,” Secretary of State Wayne Williams said earlier this month. “A lot of our systems are so old that they’re based on Microsoft systems that Microsoft no longer supports.”
The upgrades to newer machines will cost about $10 million to $15 million, with counties picking up the tab. A voting machine will be chosen by 2016, with counties free to upgrade whenever they’re ready.
In Adams County, Martin said he has budgeted between $600,000 and $800,000 next year for a new system.
That new system, Martin said, could be the one Adams County uses this year, or Secretary of State Williams could choose one of the other three.
Either way, Martin said, all the new systems are built with mail ballots in mind, as opposed to the old ones that were designed to count ballots at local precincts.
Martin said the new machines are dramatically faster than the old ones. On Monday, election officials processed 12,000 ballots in about three hours. That would have taken close to three days with the county’s old systems, which were purchased between 2002 and 2005.
Martin said that with the lower voter turnout that is typical for an odd-year election, this year marks an ideal time to try the new ones and get used to them before the far-busier Presidential election in 2016.
“It’s going to be much easier for us, we have rough half the ballots have the workload compared to next year,” he said.
The upgrades come as elections administrators nationwide sound alarms about aging voting machines. Unlike old-school mechanical vote-counters, the wave of electronic voting machines adopted after the contested 2000 presidential election weren’t built to last decades.
In Adams County, Martin said he has budgeted between $600,000 and $800,000 next year for a new system.
That new system, Martin said, could be the one Adams County uses this year, or Secretary of State Williams could choose one of the other three.
Nearly every state in the nation will be using machines next year that are at or near the end of their projected lifespans, according to a September report by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
“Old voting equipment increases the risk of failures and crashes … and problems only get worse the longer we wait,” the authors wrote.
Williams says Colorado is ahead of the problem by starting now to phase out old machines. But he couldn’t give an estimate for when the new machines would be in every county.
“We’re looking at a phased-in approach, so that if a county has a system in place that is working for them, they won’t have to replace them,” Williams said.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report.