Steve Pomerance

Introduction: There seem to be three major potentials for vote mis-counts or fraud: votes being improperly recorded or tallied, vote buying or voter coercion, and ballot box stuffing or ballot shredding. Unless every voter watch every other voter and every public official at every step, it’s impossible to be truly certain that some form of mis-count or fraud did not occur, no matter what the system. Right now, voters have two primary concerns: Were my votes accurately recorded? Were everyone’s votes totaled up accurately? Current “trust me” systems, whether paper or machine based, do not allow ordinary citizens to allay these concerns. But both these concerns can be simply addressed by allowing voters to independently check the County Clerk’s records of the votes in a way that still preserves the anonymity of the voting process. Summary of Proposal: Every individual citizen’s votes would be anonymously recorded as a single record

This concept, popularized by Garret Hardin in the 1960s, discusses a community owned pasture that is becoming overgrazed because, although each additional cow on the land benefited that cow’s owner, the end result was damage to everyone. In other words, the cumulative effect of decisions that may benefit given individuals may irreversibly harm the whole community. This problem manifests itself in as many ways as we have “commons.” At the most global level, our common atmosphere has provided us with the stable climate that allowed humans to flourish. Yet our extra cows — our individual greenhouse gas emissions — are in the process of destabilizing our climate, threatening to extinguish much of life on Earth. Locally, we have many commons: wonderful open space, great mountain views, mostly non-gridlocked street system, lots of parks and recreation centers, good schools, multiple bikeways, some permanently affordable housing, accessible libraries, peaceful and uncongested neighbor

I commend the Boulder City Council for having an ambitious list of projects to consider for its January 2019 retreat. But the first thing I’d like to see the council do is to correct some of what went awry in 2018. Their goal here should be to re-establish trust between the citizens, city staff, and council members so we all can work together to make Boulder a better place to live. First on the list is the “opportunity zone” mess. It is simply unacceptable that the city staff did not immediately communicate with the Council and the public about the opportunity zone process when the state informed them about it in mid-February 2018. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to forward the state’s emailed request to the council Hotline. Then the Council members and interested citizens could have known about it. But instead, the city manager submitted the application without anyone knowing except some city Economic Vitality staff members and Chamber of Commerce folks. The city