Auditor calls for resignations

Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 8, 2006 at midnight

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Denver city auditor Dennis Gallagher today called for the resignation of the Denver county clerk, his two fellow election commissioners, and the entire senior management of the election commission in the wake of disastrous computer failures that kept many people from voting Tuesday.

Voters stood in lines as long as three and a half hours waiting to cast ballots, because election judges could not check their voter registration. Laptops connected to a database of 350,000 voters slowed repeatedly, and stopped completely at least twice. Many voters gave up and left.

Mayor John Hickenlooper said he is appointing a small, high-level task force to investigate the Denver's entire elections process and report back with suggested changes by mid-December. "The system structurally is broken. This isn't the first election that's gone bad," he said in a meeting at the Rocky Mountain News.

Hickenlooper said he had no authority to force the election commission to take the task force's recommendations but he suggested there might be public pressure for the commission to accept them.

Hickenlooper can appoint and fire the County Clerk, Wayne Vaden, who is one of three election commissioners. The other two commissioners are part-time and elected: Sandy Adams and Susan Rogers.

Gallagher called a press conference this morning to say Hickenlooper "should ask for the resignation of County Clerk Wayne Vaden or flat out fire him."

For election commissioners Adams and Rogers, Gallagher was more delicate, saying, "If it were me, I would be so humiliated by what happened that I would certainly consider resigning immediately."

Gallagher also called for the firing of election commission executive director John Gaydeski and his senior managers. That would be up to the three commissioners, not the mayor.

Both the mayor and Vaden reacted to Gallagher's call by saying the first priority is finishing counting the vote in Denver. A scanner breakdown has left tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted.

Adams called Gallagher's call for resignations "grandstanding." She stood by Gaydeski, who has been on the job only about six months.

Gallagher also said he would work to place a charter amendment on next spring's ballot to switch oversight of Denver elections to an elected county clerk, the structure used in other Colorado counties. He said the current system — of two elected commissioners and a full-time county clerk appointed by the mayor — allowed everyone to defer responsibility to someone else.

Gallagher said he is "outraged" at the election problems because he had warned there would be serious problems for months. He cited the lack of a detailed plan with contingency plans for emergencies like the failure of the voter registration computers.

"We may never know what the real outcome of some of those races would have been, because so many voters were not able to vote," the auditor said.

Meanwhile, Sequoia Voting Systems is providing a loaner scanner to Denver to finish counting the ballots.

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