Signs that Denver’s election was in trouble surfaced early at the phone bank set up to help election judges at the city’s 55 vote centers, say two part-time employees who have worked election phone banks for several years.
Then as the disaster built, poor planning and understaffing made it impossible for election workers to handle problems, they said.
Elaine Calzolari and Marta Crespin – two of the four people who handled calls from election judges Nov. 7 – were overwhelmed with requests for assistance, they said.
As electronic pollbook computers slowed and then froze, phone-bank workers ran through the Wellington Webb municipal building looking for help from technical experts, Calzolari said.
The phone-bank workers competed for two supervisors’ attention to deal with problems and urged quick rule changes to let them handle problems quickly.
Calzolari, who works in the Colorado Senate as a calendar clerk, and Crespin, who formerly worked for US West communicating technical information to customers, said there were signs that problems were lurking during the last few elections and primaries.
“Problems could have been anticipated by anyone with even the slightest working knowledge of DEC (Denver Election Commission) operations,” Calzolari wrote in a summary of her experiences.
During early voting five days before the election, she was handling calls when the computer system went down, she said.
Calzolari said she watched as the commission’s technology chief, Anthony Rainey, in the presence of now-resigned clerk and recorder Wayne Vaden, scolded two phone-bank employees for triggering the outage by accidentally searching incorrectly for voter registrations on the computers.
“That should have been an indication that it was vulnerable,” Calzolari said. “Someone should have asked, ‘What’s going to happen when you get 200 barely- trained judges on the system?”‘
When similar problems occurred on Election Day, she scrambled to help election judges at centers, processed voters over the phone and ran through the building seeking a technical expert to answer a question.
“I’ll never work there again,” Calzolari said.
Crespin, who has worked for the Denver election phone banks since 2000, said she was amazed that Denver election officials didn’t appear bothered by early- voting and primary problems.
“If I can see this during the short time I’m there – a few days – why in the world can other people not see that the system’s broken?” Crespin asked.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
