County Commissioners Renewed the Dominion Contract

Photo from tapinto.net

At a workshop on Dec. 5 county clerk Kim Purcell presented 2 contract options for Voting Systems to the Commissioners. The Dominion contract was up for renewal. The discussion on the choice between Clear Ballot and Dominion was short and simple. There was a concern stated by the county attorney Ian MacLaren, that Clear Ballot had an item in the contract that stated that the county would be unable to look at the data more than once a year, unless declared by law. He also mentioned that the contracts would not claim any liablility for mistakes. But MacLaren dismissed these concerns as highly unlikely, and would not be expected to be a problem. The decision then came down to cost, and Dominion costs were less than Clear Ballot. Kim Purcell stated that she had no issues with Dominion, they had been very supportive, and she implied that was her choice.

The vote was actually taken the next day at the regular Dec. 6 BOCC meeting. The commissioners voted unanimously to accept the "refresh" of the Dominion Voting Systems present contract for 6 years, at a cost of $33,000 per year.

There was absolutely no discussion of the necessity of using these election machines, despite being presented with evidence of fraud in the machines several times over the past 8 months. Mike Lynch had presented the commissioners the 3 Mesa County reports that showed evidence of fraud, and that the machines cannot be trusted. Kim Purcell has never proved her machines were trustworthy by doing sporadic hand counts on election day to see if they match the machine count.

It has been stated by many election integrity experts that the cost of hand counting paper ballots would be only about 25% of the cost of using the election machines. The recommendation for free and fair elections are for in-person, one day voting on paper ballots with hand counting in individual precincts. My question is : could the $33,000 per year be better spent on important improvements in our county?

Lori York, DVM