City Councilwoman Marcia Johnson has taken the lead in trying to reform Denver’s dysfunctional Election Commission. Working with Council President Rosemary Rodriguez and Mayor John Hickenlooper, Johnson will lead an eight-member committee and host a series of public meetings aimed at crafting a reform plan for the November ballot.
We eagerly await the result. Problems with city elections are a crisis waiting to happen.
Even before the recent disclosure that the commission had lost voting records containing personal data of 150,000 voters – 87,000 of which were later recovered – there was widespread agreement that Denver’s current election system isn’t working well. The commission has struggled with staff problems and low morale. In 2004, 13,000 absentee ballots were mailed late.
The problem seems rooted in the nature of the partly elected, partly appointed commission, a system used by no other county except Broomfield, which shares the city/county structure with Denver. In Colorado’s 62 other counties, elections are overseen by an elected clerk and recorder, who also keeps track of routine records such as deeds to property. In contrast, most municipalities in Colorado appoint their city clerks, who are in charge of routine record keeping but don’t handle elections.
Denver struggles with a hybrid system that manages to combine the worst elements of both the county and city patterns. Denver’s mayor appoints a city clerk to handle the record-keeping functions. But that appointed clerk is also a voting member of the Election Commission, along with two independently elected members.
Counties have proven that a single elected clerk can usually handle elections competently – and can be ousted by the voters if the job gets bungled. But Denver voters can’t oust the appointed clerk who is one of their three election overseers, and Denver mayors can’t fire the two elected commissioners. The result of trying to put three people in charge of elections is that no one is really in charge and no one is accountable.
Rodriguez, herself a former appointed city clerk, will submit to the new panel the proposal she drafted last year to replace the existing tangle with a single elected clerk and recorder. But she’s also indicated she is sensitive to objections raised by title companies and others that the pure record-keeping functions of the city clerk should remain in the hands of mayoral appointees.
Local officials should examine the alternatives with an eye toward updating the system so that both tasks – elections and record keeping – are handled with competence and efficiency.
