Dear editor:

In his letter published May 2, Larry French purports to speak for all of us when he says that the “county commissioners have repeatedly voted to stop the Park County people from voting the way that they want!” Lest the commissioners believe that, I must say that I do get to vote the way that I want. I believe that the competent and conscientious folks who run our elections for us take the necessary steps to ensure election integrity. And I am not alone. I also know that there are many effective ways to ensure the security of electronic systems, proven over decades, so if the standard measures ever became inadequate, it would be easy to implement new ones and ramp up the protection.

Given that the nearly 17,000 ballots cast in 2020 probably exceeds the number of fingers and toes on the proposed paper ballot hand-counters, it is unfortunate that Mr. French did not spell out how the totals would be obtained. People doing math on sheets of paper? Punching numbers into calculators, or, gasp, computers? Now those are recipes for errors.  

The party resolution mentioned by Mr. French that calls for hand counting of ballots was not a surprise, given that this has become a popular issue among those always on the lookout for new things about which to be outraged. The only surprise is that they didn’t go further and resolve that all voters must arrive by horseback (one per horse, please, so the hand-counters don’t get confused with the number of ballots).  

Going backward is not always a good idea, and that is clear in this case. We have a good and efficient system that works, and we have competent people managing it and adapting precautions to maintain the integrity of our elections. The commissioners saw that, and they made the right decision. Kudos to them.  

Mike Roberts

Cody