On June 22, the mounting woes of the Denver Election Commission prompted us to warn in this column, “Problems with city elections are a crisis waiting to happen.” The numerous miscues that plagued the primary election on Aug. 8 strongly suggest that the wait won’t be very long.
Only light turnout – just 12,960 people voted in person – spared Denver the massive delays that would have occurred had a far larger portion of Denver’s 268,186 registered voters shown up, as they are expected to do in November. The poor showing provides little confidence that the Election Commission is overcoming its poor past record.
We hope we’re unduly pessimistic, because city officials are sweeping the situation under the rug.
The Election Commission’s chronic problems prompted City Councilwoman Marcia Johnson to lead an eight-member committee to craft a reform plan for the November ballot. Unfortunately, the committee’s recommendations, which won approval in a 10-2 preliminary council vote Monday, leave intact the commission’s unwieldy structure of two elected commissioners plus the appointed city clerk. The council should spike the package on final review because its few worthy notions can be adopted without changing the charter.
The best recommendation was to clarify that the commission’s full-time executive director serves at the will of the three commissioners. But as Councilwoman Kathleen MacKenzie notes, that can probably be accomplished simply by specifying in the job description that the staff director can be fired at will. That’s the technique the City Council uses already with its own staff director.
The committee also recommended putting the lower-level staff under career service protection, without requiring them to go through the rigorous career service selection process. Such a move would only make it harder to remove incompetent staff members.
Finally, the committee urged moving the voting for the two elected commissioners, now scheduled to accompany voting for mayor and council members in May 2007, to the November 2009 elections to coincide with Denver school board voting. Johnson said she hopes the media would pay more attention to the commissioner races if they aren’t overshadowed by the mayoral contest. But, in fact, the media are far busier in November off-year elections – when suburban mayors, councils and school boards are chosen – than they are in Denver’s one-0f-a-kind May elections.
The council should bench this petty and contradictory package and consider real reforms for the 2007 ballot.
