City Auditor Dennis Gallagher officially began his effort Thursday to do away with the commission responsible for this week’s election debacle.
Gallagher filed the paperwork necessary to put a charter change on the May ballot to replace the Denver Election Commission with a single, elected clerk and recorder.
He will have to collect about 14,000 signatures to put the proposal to voters in May.
Meanwhile, City Council members, apoplectic over Election Day troubles, held an emergency meeting on the failed launch of vote centers in Denver.
Tuesday’s vote was the first general election in which the city used 55 centers instead of traditional neighborhood precincts, prompting long delays as poll workers trying to check in voters had problems accessing the city’s voter-registration database.
Councilwoman Elbra Wedgeworth said she wanted to see the city do away with the vote centers and go back to the system of voting in precincts.
“People trust the precinct system, and maybe we should stick with that,” she said.
Election Commissioner Susan Rogers told the City Council that commission members wanted to switch to an all-mail ballot.
But some council members took issue with that idea.
“The idea that we have all this equipment and it doesn’t service us, to me, is alarming,” said Councilwoman Carol Boigon.
The council plans to hold a public hearing with the election commissioners as soon as next weekend – although a firm date has not been set.
Boigon also ordered up an audit of the commission’s computer equipment that is expected to begin in a matter of days.
Both come on top of an investigative task force that Mayor John Hickenlooper announced Wednesday. Some council members questioned that decision, given that it would be the third time in two years that city officials have looked at overhauling the commission.
“People actually were alarmed at convening another blue-ribbon, fact-finding panel,” Councilwoman Judy Montero said.
Whatever their decisions, Auditor Gallagher’s spokesman, Denis Berckefeldt, said the overhaul is coming. “The auditor is not going to wait,” Berckefeldt told the council. “He thinks that this needs to happen, and it needs to happen now.”
After filing paperwork Thursday, Gallagher and his Denver Voters for Election Reform committee have 10 days to come up with petition language.
Berckefeldt said the petition would say that the election commissioners, also up for a vote on the May ballot, would serve only until November, when a clerk and recorder would be elected.
Currently, there are two elected commissioners, and an appointed clerk and recorder serves as the third.
System-backup woes
Delays in backing up a voter-registration database early Tuesday morning may have contributed to long lines early in the morning of Election Day, according to Sandy Adams, a Denver election commissioner, and Jenny Rose Flanagan, executive director of Colorado Common Cause.
Election officials wanted to update the database as late as possible before Election Day, Adams said, to be sure it noted as many absentee voters as possible. But the process didn’t finish by the 7 a.m. opening of polls in Denver.
Flanagan said other election officials gave her the same explanation for early-morning delays Election Day. “But this doesn’t explain the problems we saw later in the day, the problems we saw in the primary,” she said. “We should have addressed them before the election.”
– Katy Human
