Making your vote safer and easier to cast

I got the show and tell tour of what’s being done with voting in El Paso County to keep it streamlined, simple and faster in the 2012 election. Alissa Van Der Veen is with the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s Office. She told me that her office has been working on improvements in the system for four years. When it comes to being ready, she said, “We are absolutely ready. We start the minute we close one election and we are already preparing for the next. “

You will see those changes in early voting. The touch screens are gone. Van Der Veen says you’ll be getting a paper ballot to fill out. She believes that will make your early voting experience faster and speed up those lines. The public has also been instrumental in helping to choose the best polling place locations for this election.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler has told Boulder, Eagle and Chaffee counties to stop using mail in ballots that have identifying markers on them. It could lead to ballots being tracked back to voters. If the markings in those counties are not eliminated, election results in those counties could be invalidated.

El Paso County has not been using those kind of markers. The Clerk & Recorder’s Office goes extra steps to ensure your voting privacy. Van Der Veen tells me, there is a stub with the ballot number on it, “We remove that stub and there is no way to match the voter with the ballot.” I asked, ” You’re not tracking who does what? ” Van Der Veen replied, “We have no idea who cast that ballot once we remove that stub. We take voter privacy very seriously.”

That privacy even extends to Election Judges. Those judges count everything face down and process everything face down. Van Der Veen believes that process is instrumental for your privacy, “Those judges can’t get that mental tabulation of where a race is going. It’s because everything id done face down and away from them.”