Denver election officials exceeded their budget by more than $1 million because of the switch from neighborhood polling places to larger, more concentrated vote centers and the lengthy vote-counting process.
Denver Election Commission executive director John Gaydeski on Wednesday told a panel investigating problems on Election Day that the commission is over its budget by another $300,000 to $350,000. That is in addition to a budget supplement of more than $750,000 that the City Council approved this month.
The total is an increase of about one-third over the commission’s $3 million 2006 budget.
“We had been warned that more could be coming,” said Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, who leads the council’s finance committee. “But we did not know what the amount would be.”
Gaydeski told the Election Commission Investigative Panel that Denver’s election vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, would pick up some of the tab but it was not clear how much.
Faatz said she is keenly interested in how much Sequoia pays because “clearly they created a number of problems.”
The first time the council approved additional money for the Election Commission, Councilman Charlie Brown agreed, but added:
“I just hope that the story that we read about (the day after the election) is who won and lost and not major problems with the election,” he told Gaydeski during a committee meeting. “Because, I tell you, if that happens – wow. That would be defeat for all of us.”
However, problems were the norm in Denver on Election Day as computer failures led to long lines and printing mistakes delayed ballot counting for days.
So Gaydeski and others, on Wednesday, appeared in front of the investigative panel that Mayor John Hickenlooper and council President Michael Hancock convened.
Jenny Rose Flanagan, a panel member and executive director of Colorado Common Cause, told the panel that many of the issues on Election Day could have been prevented.
“A lot of us did anticipate that there would be some kind of problems,” Flanagan said.
Flanagan said Common Cause and other groups were meeting as stakeholders with the Election Commission in the weeks leading up to the election.
“There were a lot of things that we talked about that just weren’t implemented,” she said.
Gaydeski told the panel about failures in communication. He said he was not well informed about tests that could have been done to ensure computers were up to the task.
Officials misjudged how many provisional ballots they needed, he said.
The Election Commission ordered 4,799 provisional ballots – ballots that could be cast by someone without proper ID or whose registration was in doubt.
By early in the day, vote centers were running out of the ballots.
“To run out of something that early is just not right,” Gaydeski said.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 303-954-1657 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
