A Republican candidate for state legislature requested a recount of Boulder County’s election results last week in an effort to give election integrity activists an opportunity to examine concerns about how the election was run. But now Ellyn Hilliard, who ran unsuccessfully against Democrat Jonathan Singer for state representative from District 11, has withdrawn her request after being told by Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall’s office that the recount would cost her nearly $28,000. (Candidates requesting recounts must pay for them unless the recount is automatically triggered by margin of victory of 0.5 percent or less.)
That dollar figure is about twice as high as it should be, according to Andrew Cole of the secretary of state’s office. And Boulder County canvass board members, who would have to do the recount, estimated the pricetag of a four-day recount at $4,770.
But Deputy Clerk Molly Tayer told Boulder Weekly that the cost estimate is accurate, given the amount of overtime pay that would have had to be shelled out over three days to conduct the recount before the deadline.
Hilliard acknowledges that her motivation behind asking for ballots to be retallied is not to reverse the results (Singer won by a significant margin, more than 5,000 votes). She says she requested the recount after learning about claims of election irregularities from members of the canvass board.
“I submitted the recount request so that the canvass board could gain some transparency,” she told BW.
A four-person majority on the canvass board, two Republicans and two American Constitution Party members, began meeting without Hall’s blessing in late September and have been at odds with the clerk about the extent of the board’s authority ever since.
In her Dec. 7 request to the secretary of state’s office for a recount, Hilliard cites the canvass board’s $4,770 cost estimate and notes that Douglas County paid $800 for a 21,000-ballot recount after the primary election last summer. Using that cost model in Boulder County, which had about 180,000 ballots, would generate a recount pricetag of about $7,200.
Full Article: Sticker shock nixes Republican’s recount effort.