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Democracy crashes, gets the reboot
By Andrew Flohr-Spence
spencand@mscd.edu

Election Day did not go so smoothly for Denver. A near-collapse of the newly revamped voting system resulted in long lines and numerous people not voting because they didn’t have three hours to wait. On Tuesday, one week later, the Denver Election Commission was still counting provisional ballots, leaving several issues still undecided and the next secretary of state, as of press time, unnamed.

It was supposed to be different. The 2006 election was supposed to be the year Denver would move into the 21st century by transforming its voting system from top to bottom. The city was going where few had gone before.

The old precinct system of hundreds of neighborhood voting locations lined with monstrous, clunky machines was replaced by 55 computer-equipped voter centers, where voters could go no matter where they lived.

Special software was developed. Paper voter rolls, on which election judges would previously check off your name when you voted, were replaced with e-poll books, laptops connected to a voter-registration database.

A paper trail was added so voters could be sure they voted correctly, and numerous other features were included in the hopes of making the system watertight against possible voter fraud.

The only problem with all the fine plans was that somehow everything ended up going wrong.
In order to keep the list of registered voters current, the Denver Election Commission waited until the night before to update the system.

The update, unfortunately, still wasn’t finished at 7 a.m. when the polls opened. When the first voters began arriving at the newly styled voter centers, and thousands of new names began flooding in, the e-poll laptops began to struggle, and they never did catch up.

At 10 a.m. the technicians made adjustments, balancing the workload of each server, but the system remained bogged down. At 1 p.m. the system was so slow that election commissioners decided to reboot, stopping the election citywide for minutes while the computers came back on line. At 5 p.m. the servers simply froze, forcing a second reboot of the entire system.

The last votes were cast as late as 10 p.m., with waits of more than three hours reported. The press has called it a debacle. Mayor Hickenlooper was outraged. Election commissioner Susan Rogers said the whole thing was embarrassing.

“I really, really apologize to anybody who had to spend a very long time standing in line,” Rogers said to reporters.

The list of mistakes and malfunctions that occurred throughout the entire election process was as long as the ballot itself. And even before the last votes have been counted, city officials far and wide are now clamoring for action.

The technology chief for the election commission has been placed on administrative leave. Election Clerk Wayne Vaden resigned Nov. 14. The mayor has formed an advisory committee to investigate the problems. The city auditor has called for doing away with the commission altogether and replacing it with a single election clerk and recorder, and even the Denver City Council has a proposal.

Everyone wants to blame someone for the mistakes and everyone has a better idea for the solution. The question I have is, didn’t we have a system that worked? It seems to me that we tried to fix what wasn’t broke, and it’s only made it more difficult to vote – something that should be the easiest thing in the world.