Boulder County Clerk and Recorder did the right thing. This is not to give Hillary Hall a pass on the delay in election results. This is not to say that the public ought to forget that she won this job by crucifying Linda Salas, a fellow Democrat for exactly the same actions while she served as the County Party Chair. But by making a public statement and owning her responsibility she has done the right thing. This demonstration of courage and accountability is all to rare from those holding public office and for this Hillary Hall is to be commended.
As for the considerable delay in the election results, it is certainly regrettable, those responsible deserve scrutiny, and the consequences. However it is certainly premature to lay the blame solely on the County Clerk. I believe when the audit is complete it will show that the errors that caused the delay stem from many sources. It is likely that from the County staff to the voting machine vendors there will be plenty of culpability to go around and everyone involved will get their fair share. With that in mind given the situation that was known at the time the County Clerk did her job by favoring accuracy over speed. The mistake was not the choice in the heat of battle, but Hillary Hall's own words in her campaign against Linda Salas are an unfortunate but earned liability.
The lessons learned here are that for starters we have a serious endemic problem with how we run our elections in Boulder Countyand our struggles here certainly call into question the reliability and accuracy of the counties state and nationwide that use similar voting machines. Within the temptation to vilify Boulder County for the delay, the better part of wisdom does beg the question, did the other jurisdictions have superior staffing or did they not recognize or worse choose to ignore the same problems that Hillary Hall corrected? We also learned that it is unwise to turn a knee-jerk reaction into a campaign platform. It is difficult to truly know what a job is until you are actually doing it. Aside from running elections County Clerks spend most of their time filing title deeds and issuing license plates. For what it is worth, in the 2006 primary I voted to retain Linda Salas.
I respected and was frankly surprised by the unusual spirit of democracy that was evidenced by a primary election against an incumbent. To often political party's "let it ride" with their incumbent knowing full well that the city, county, state, or nation would be better served with "anybody but". And if as party chair you recognize that your party's best chance to retain a seat is to run yourself, I would even argue that it is then your responsibility to do so. With that in mind, in lopsided Democratic Boulder County Linda Salas was in no danger of loosing a general election, and aside from the 2004 election I thought she was doing a fairly good job. As a car salesman I have frequent interactions with the DMV for example and as far as DMV's go, I thought Linda Salas was doing a fine job and saw no compelling reason to fire her.
So from the outcome of this election I hope that we have learned that we should offer equal amounts of patience as criticism to our elected leaders as became apparent in this case a knee-jerk reaction to replace leadership yielded exactly the same results. Had we exercised prudence rather than passion perhaps we would have figured out what actually happened in 2004. Let's give Hillary Hall a chance to fix this problem.
And while we offer Hillary Hall time and scrutiny in equal measure I think we also owe Linda Salas a heart felt apology.
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