Following the disclosure that the Denver Election Commission had lost personal data on more than 150,000 voters, a Denver councilwoman Saturday said the agency may need to be overhauled.
Councilwoman Carol Boigon said she wanted to revisit an earlier proposal from Council President Rosemary Rodriguez that stalled last year.
Rodriguez had proposed eliminating the three-member commission and replacing it with one elected official who would oversee the agency.
“I’m wondering if we have the proper structure for election services,” Boigon said, casting doubt on the way the current three-member commission operates.
Other City Council members were taking a wait-and-see approach after learning that a file cabinet containing microfilm with voter registrations from 1989 to 1998 had disappeared.
The missing records contained voters’ names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, signatures and addresses, according to a Friday statement from the commission website.
The cabinet has been missing since the commission moved to its new offices at 303 W. Colfax Ave. in February.
“We don’t even know what we’re missing,” said John Gaydeski, who took over as executive director of the commission three weeks ago. “We think they may have been incorporated into other records, but we can’t even find the cabinet. We’ve contacted the movers for their records.
“We may have hard copies of the registrations. I don’t know. But it’s the privacy issue we’re most concerned about.”
Gaydeski said he doesn’t believe the records were stolen, but he filed a police report Saturday afternoon.
Kathleen Mills, supervisor and trainer of the city’s election judges, resigned Friday. She had been ordered to coordinate the commission’s move last February after four staffers refused the job.
Some staffers had known the microfilm was missing since shortly after the move, according to Election Commissioner Jan Tyler, who served from 1995 to 2003. She confirmed it was missing in March. It was not reported publicly until June 1, after a former temporary worker, Lisa Jones, revealed the incident on the Web blog heartbrokentiger.com on May 31.
The commissioners were alerted to the missing records by Councilwoman Judy Montero, who forwarded the May 31 posting in an e-mail.
The microfilm had been taken out of the file cabinet last summer when Anthony Rainey, the commission’s information technology and records manager, undertook the task of matching voter signatures with their registrations. Rainey had temporary workers spread the records out on the third floor of the commission’s old offices on West 14th Street, staffers said.
Other council members said they wanted to give Gaydeski time to address the issue.
“I’m worried about the impact this will have on voters and registration,” Councilman Charlie Brown said. “In the old days, people didn’t want to register because they thought they might get called for jury duty. Now, they’ve got a real good excuse.”
Still, he said, any effort to restructure the commission would be “premature at best.”
Rodriguez shelved last year’s proposal to have one elected official oversee the panel after the idea failed to gain the support of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and a majority of the council.
Boigon said she fears that having two elected commissioners and a mayoral appointee – city clerk and recorder Wayne Vaden – run the agency causes confusion. Putting one person in charge would create clarity, she said.
“Instead of finger-pointing and not a lot of action, you would have one person responsible,” Boigon said.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-820-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
