Letter from James D. Parmenter
Voting – December 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
I have only partial knowledge of the local and statewide problems with the new computer equipment used on Nov. 7. However, even that partial knowledge indicates that the equipment suppliers deserve to be taken to court and forced to refund any and all money they have been paid.
When citizens assemble to exercise their sacred civic duty of voting, all involved in recording, counting and reporting that vote — individually and severally — must be held to the highest standard of accountability. With the vote, that is zero errors.
How can any person or corporation providing or operating an electronic device intended to aid citizens in the exercise of their sacred duty to our Republic not understand that such devices must work in adverse conditions? Most particularly, electronic devices must have a supply of a constant value of electric power in order to function at a basic level. These voting devices should be designed and constructed to the standards already applied to the computerized equipment supplied to the military for use on the battlefield. I am not joking.
I am enraged because I worked with such elementary computer issues in the 1970s. Thirty years ago all computer equipment had to be tried out with the idea that things go wrong. Now it is evident that the “peddler” of the equipment is believed “hook, line, and sinker” and is not required to have a technical representative on hand. Additionally, the county staff evidently had no glimmer that because the machines run on electricity they could have problems that the old “punch card” machines did not have.
Is there going to be any accountability in the County Clerk & Recorder’s office for the disaster where the media show voters sitting at cocktail tables filling out paper ballots? (And this is not about the media view; it’s about the collapse of the entire chain of “oversight” of elections.) Of course not. The County Clerk will not fire anyone. She is going out of office anyway, so why should she? Perhaps “Ruth in the booth,” Treasurer of the Republican successor’s campaign, could answer questions about how a County Clerk should be “responsible.”
If it had not been for the stupidity of the Denver Election Commission, Montrose could have been in those front page reports about the places which couldn’t run an electronic election.
James D. Parmenter
Montrose