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Voters up, systems down
Long lines, network malfunctions plague Denver voting process
By David Pollan and Geof Wollerman
dpollan@mscd.edu • gwollerm@mscd.edu

Photo by Jenn LeBlanc • jkerriga@mscd.edu James Boswell, the last person in line, awaits his opportunity to vote at 9:48 p.m. Nov. 7 at the voting center in the Tivoli’s Multicultural Lounge, which opened at 7 a.m. A reported 1,176 voters cast their ballots on campus. Despite long waits, those who were in line by 7 p.m. were allowed to vote. This year’s election marks the first time a voting center was set up on the Auraria Campus.

The rebooting of the computerized voting election system and high voter turnout led to long lines and Election Day chaos throughout the city of Denver on Nov. 7.

At closing time many of the city’s 55 voting centers reported waits of more than two hours, due in large part to the many delays caused by repeated network failures.

Denver was forced to reboot its voting system twice during the day due to the inability of the network of servers to process the high volume of voter registration information.

“We started out the day with slowness,” said Alton Dillard, communications director for the Denver Election Commission.

The overload began to affect wait times at polling centers, forcing local election judges to manually verify registered voters via telephone, which compounded the delays even more, Dillard said.

According to Sandy Adams, a Denver election commissioner, the system began slowing down almost as soon as the polls opened at 7 a.m. Because Denver wanted to get a jump-start on recording its absentee ballot information, the commission initiated an information backup at 2 a.m. that was not completed until 7:45 a.m., which is when the impending information overload became apparent.

“(The election commission) probably should have started the backup at one o’clock, but who is to know, because the (problems) didn’t start until a quarter to eight,” Adams said. “People were able to vote but it was very slow because they (the commission) were doing the backup at the same time as they (poll workers) were getting into the voting machines.”

The first reboot took place around 1 p.m., shutting down the network citywide for approximately three minutes, and was initiated by the commission to prevent a complete crash of the system, Dillard said.

“The only way I can explain it, is that it was like clearing the cache,” he said.

Dillard said the reboot refreshed the system and cleared out the bottleneck, allowing voter information to be transmitted more rapidly. The voting machines themselves were not affected, but the laptop computers used to verify voters were shut down during the reboot. Dillard reiterated that no votes were lost in the process.

It was during this time that the commission swore in an additional 80 to 100 volunteer election judges and dispersed them throughout the 55 voting centers.

“It’s not really all that unusual for counties to need election officials during the day,” said Dana Williams, spokeswoman for the Colorado Secretary of State.

The commission also sent out additional laptops to 10 “hot spots,” where voter turnout was particularly high, so the voter verification process could be expedited.

Recognizing that long lines and network failures would be problematic throughout the day, the Colorado Democratic Party filed an injunction in the morning with the Denver District Court to keep the polls open for an extra two hours, until 9 p.m. Judge Sheila Rappaport returned with a verdict at around 3 p.m., declaring that keeping the polls open was unnecessary.

“Based on the evidence, the court does not find that irreparable harm has been done,” Rappaport said.

She also said she did not have the authority to keep the polls open, citing legal precedent from other states.

“This is a problem of the legislature not the courts,” Rappaport said.

Despite the failed injunction, voting continued until around 10 p.m. at some voting centers. Though the difficulties created long waits, everyone who was in line to vote by 7 p.m. was given the opportunity to do so.

However, the commission’s problems were far from over.

Though the initial system reboot was performed to avoid a complete network shutdown, the system finally crashed at approximately 5 p.m., according to Susan Rogers, a commissioner for the Denver Election Commission.

After the crash the system was rebooted for the second time.

“It just clogged it,” Rogers said. “Just like a traffic accident causes people to stop and rubberneck, (the reboot) stops the process for a while, the line builds up longer, and then it moves more slowly when it gets started.”

The second reboot cleared the system again and there were no further problems with the servers for the duration of the evening, though long lines continued until well after the polls closed.

Denver’s network trouble was not the only factor in what quickly became one of the nation’s most problematic elections. The fact that Denver, Colorado’s largest county, consolidated its polling stations and provided a particularly long ballot, also contributed to the long Election Day delays. Because the city of Denver used the same number of machines as it has in the past, increasing the number of polling stations would not have made a difference, Dillard said. It would have only thinned the number of machines at each polling center.

Williams said that though the Secretary of State’s office was working with the county of Denver to help ease some of the problems, the office does not deal with specifics of counties’ internal election systems. The problems Denver experienced needed to be addressed by the city.

“Their server system is what it is,” Williams said.

The Secretary of State plans on meeting with Denver county election officials to discuss how to prevent these problems in the future.

“Obviously there are some issues, and the Secretary of State wants to sit down and work with the county of Denver in a positive way,” she said. But she also noted that it was important for counties to run their own elections.

Gerard Morris, a computer information systems professor at Metro, said he couldn’t comment specifically on Denver’s election system due to his unfamiliarity with the network. But he said that when any system experiences a bottleneck of information there are several things that might provide a solution.

“You could have more servers, higher performing machines, better network connections,” Morris said. “These are sort of general design issues that would have to be addressed.”

Regarding the Election Day problems, Morris said one question that could be asked is why the system was not tested.

“It sounds like they didn’t estimate the capacity well enough,” he said.

In a press conference at the Denver Election Commission, Rogers apologized for the problems, calling the fiasco an embarrassment. But she defended the commission by saying that not all of its people are technologically savvy.

“We are not IT people,” she said. “We truly anticipated the wait time would be based on the length of the ballot and the time it took people to vote, not the time it took to log people in.”