Denver’s lone full-time election commissioner resigned Tuesday, accepting some of the blame for the city’s election debacle.
But while Wayne Vaden, who is also the city’s clerk and recorder, accepted his “fair share of responsibility,” he also faulted the structure of the commission.
“Serving as one of three Denver Election Commissioners has proved to be a difficult and frustrating experience,” Vaden wrote.
He said the commission’s status as an independent body and his role as Mayor John Hickenlooper’s appointee created an uncomfortable structure.
“I wasn’t supposed to be in charge of the Election Commission,” he said in an interview, “but I was viewed as being in charge of the Election Commission, which made me not want to be over there – it is just a real precarious situation.”
City Councilwoman and former clerk and recorder Rosemary Rod riguez said there is a history of friction between the mayor’s appointee and the two independently elected commissioners.
“The lucky ones can work around it and all get on the same page. And those that can’t work around it find themselves in conflict,” she said.
Vaden on Tuesday declined to “point fingers.” But he acknowledged that about two weeks before the election, Commissioners Susan Rogers and Sandy Adams told him to inform Hickenlooper’s administration that they were cutting off meetings with city officials concerned about information technology problems.
Vaden said Hickenlooper stood behind him “100 percent” in the days after the election and that the decision to step down was his alone. He said he plans to stay on through the end of the year to help an investigative panel appointed by Hickenlooper examine the structure of the commission and the breakdowns that led to hours-long lines on Election Day and the ensuing problems with counting ballots.
“I’m going to try to do my best to make sure what happened doesn’t happen again,” Vaden said.
Hickenlooper praised Vaden’s work, noting that the real estate lawyer took a pay cut to come to the city and cleaned up a backlog of housing titles.
“There will be no doubt many arguments about whether he was sold a bill of goods, or what exactly what all came down,” Hickenlooper said, “but you can’t argue with a guy who came in, did his job, worked hard and accepted responsibility.”
Vaden’s resignation came as officials at the Election Commission acknowledged the third printing problem with absentee ballots created by Sequoia Voting Systems. In addition to mismarked postage and transposed answer boxes, Denver’s absentee ballots had problems with the barcodes that let scanning machines sort ballots by legislative and other districts that vary throughout the city and county.
The mistake forced election workers to individually sort absentee ballots into 23 different stacks before they were ready to be counted.
Rogers said she was dismayed to learn of the latest problem given that election staffers had known about it since about Oct. 19.
“Quite frankly, it annoys me a little bit,” she said. “I didn’t realize that we did not always have to sort the ballots out.”
Asked to sum up Denver’s election performance, Rogers said, “You can’t put those words into a newspaper.”
Commission executive director John Gaydeski said the barcode issue was not the cause of the lengthy delays counting ballots. He said the physical process of opening the envelopes and the commission’s small sorting room led to delays.
“I didn’t anticipate that would go that slowly,” he said of opening the absentee ballots. “I don’t think anybody ever took the time to deliberately say, ‘Here’s how this thing should process.”‘
The as-yet-complete tally only aggravated Denver’s problems after computer pollbooks, used to check in voters at the polls, failed and backed up lines for hours.
Twenty of Colorado’s counties, including Denver, contract with Sequoia for voter registration software and support, said Boulder County elections coordinator Josh Liss. And until Denver’s election, there were no major problems.
Liss worked in the secretary of state’s office in 2001, when 21 counties decided to go with Sequoia, and he helped train county clerks on the new software, which was “less than perfect but had no major flaws,” he said.
Trouble with Denver’s computer system led Gaydeski – at least in part – to place the commission’s technology director, Anthony Rainey, on leave over the weekend.
City officials have said Rainey refused their attempts to help solve potential technical problems before the election. And while Gaydeski last week said he couldn’t recall anyone from the mayor’s staff being rebuffed, he said Tuesday that he repeatedly told Rainey to cooperate with city staff.
“My approach,” Gaydeski said, “was to push him into working with them to get what we needed. And gradually as it went along, I did it more forcefully. I said, ‘Get with these folks – play nice. They are a great resource.”‘
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 303-954-1657 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
