Boulder County Election Judges Resolve Ballot Disputes Manually

Colorado’s election system works. It just doesn’t look like the polished, automated machines politicians love to point at on cable news.

It looks like a room of low cubicles. It looks like two people, one Republican and one Democrat, arguing over a piece of paper.

That’s the reality in Boulder County nine days after the primary. The last ballots were still being counted. The process is slow. It is manual. It is bipartisan. And it is the only thing standing between a valid vote and a machine that can’t read a voter’s intent.

The Daily Sentinel reported the scene inside the counting facility. A scanner fed a batch of ballots. A worker stacked them. Then, election judges Greg Pine and Randy Paddock emerged from behind a glass partition. They weren’t watching a screen. They were looking at the physical paper.

The machine had flagged a ballot as blank. The screen showed empty ovals. But the judges knew better. They checked the unique number assigned to that specific sheet. They looked at the ink. Sometimes red ink reads as blank to a sensor. Sometimes it’s just a voter who didn’t mark anything.

Pine, a Democrat, and Paddock, a Republican, agreed. No votes to count. The system moved on.

Earlier, they reviewed a different problem. Tiny dots. Not full ovals. Just small marks that the high-tech scanners couldn’t read. The judges didn’t panic. They didn’t call a tech support line. They looked at the pattern. They agreed the dots were votes.

“We have to look and see if they’re consistent or not,” Pine said.

This is as close to a "hanging chad" as Colorado gets. But unlike Florida in 2000, this isn’t chaos. It’s a highly regulated, bipartisan check-and-balance system. Technology flags the anomaly. Human judgment resolves it.

The scrutiny is coming. President Donald Trump has spent nearly six years attacking mail-in ballot systems. He claims they fail. He claims they are rigged. There is no proof. Yet, he forced out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission this month. He gave a nationwide speech warning that electronic voting systems have vulnerabilities foreign actors could exploit.

The irony is thick. Trump wants to centralize control over voting. He wants to doubt the results. But the actual process in Boulder County relies on decentralized, human oversight. It relies on a Republican and a Democrat standing in a room, looking at the same piece of paper, and agreeing.

New Jersey just found evidence of illegal voting. Governor Mikie Sherrill said the state mistakenly registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024. Hundreds cast ballots. That’s a real error. But it wasn’t a machine failure. It was a registration error.

Colorado’s system doesn’t just count votes. It validates them. The scanners are tools. The judges are the authority.

The short version: The machines make mistakes. The humans fix them. That’s the safeguard. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t make for a good soundbite. But it works.

Pine and Paddock didn’t need a press release to tell them how to count. They needed eyes on the paper. That’s the hard fact locals need to remember when the next wave of election integrity attacks hits. The system isn’t broken. It’s just slower than you think. And that slowness is the point.