The inexcusable voting mess in Denver

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Obviously, the first major test of Denver's new "vote centers" fell somewhere between a disaster and a fiasco. Just ask the thousands of voters who waited for hours in long, snaking lines at many of the 55 centers around the city. And the undetermined number who got fed up and left without voting.

It was no picnic in Douglas County, either, where some voters endured horrendous lines, but Denver's mess seemed on a scale of its own.

Ironically, many of the 24 machines at any given Denver vote center were idle much of the time. In fact, shortly after 10 a.m. at the Wellington Webb Building, no machines were in use even though 150 people were waiting. "The computers are down," said an election official.

The problem was checking in, not voting. Everyone had to be checked against the central "electronic poll book" that kept records for every registered elector in the city.

But each voting center had only four laptops to tap into the e-poll book. Worse, the server capacity was inadequate for the job at hand. Apparently the servers had never been put to a full test before Tuesday's election. The trial run during the primary in August produced its own problems but little was learned from that experience. And the turnout Tuesday, of course, was much greater.

There is plenty of blame to go around, beginning with the three-member election commission. Two are elected, but the third, the clerk and recorder, is appointed by the mayor. Had Mayor John Hickenlooper intervened forcefully months ago, the way he is promising to do now, he might have prevented Tuesday's debacle. But he didn't take warnings seriously enough. Auditor Dennis Gallagher told him last June that "a tsunami is coming and we are not prepared." Hickenlooper replied that the allegations were "not accurate."

It's not Denver's first voting fiasco. A new system in 1982 delayed vote totals until almost 11 a.m. the next day.

The technology has progressed since then, but human mistakes and misjudgments never seem to go away.