In this ever-changing world, it is good to know there are still constants. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and the city of Denver can’t seem to run an efficient election.
Admittedly, this week’s slow vote count was much less serious than last year’s disaster, when as many as 20,000 voters may have been denied a chance to cast their ballots because of delays that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
Still, it’s never good when you have to call in a SWAT team to count votes.
This time around, nobody was denied a chance to mail in their ballots — or drop them off on Election Day, as an estimated one-third of some 90,000 voters chose to do.
However, while most suburban races were wrapped up in plenty of time for the 9 p.m. news shows, Denverites awoke Wednesday morning still not knowing the fate of one important bond issue, 1H, which authorizes $40 million for new construction at Boettcher Concert Hall and another $30 million for expanding the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. (The measure was clinging to a lead Wednesday.)
This was the first election test for Stephanie O’Malley, who last May became the first elected clerk and recorder in Denver history, as voters junked the old three-member election commission. She can’t have been pleased with the results.
Computer breakdowns slowed the posting of results to the election website. And the unexpected surge of Election Day dropoffs slowed the actual count to a crawl. Late Tuesday, about 20 members of Denver’s SWAT team were called in to relieve volunteers who were too tired to continue tallying ballots.
Of course, considering Denver voters Tuesday also ordered the city to make arrests for marijuana possession its lowest law-enforcement priority, those highly trained police officers might as well have been employed as election tellers since they can’t be deployed to bust pot smokers anymore.
Kidding aside, serious computer problems and snail-like counts in an election that drew fewer than 90,000 votes is a very bad omen. Next year’s presidential election could draw 225,000 or more voters and, despite efforts to encourage absentee mail-in ballots and early voting, most of those citizens will turn up on Election Day itself.
We don’t expect O’Malley to have worked miracles in her brief five months in office. But Tuesday’s mail-in election was handled much worse than the comparable May mail-in balloting that brought her into office.
O’Malley and her crew should learn from Tuesday’s blunders and do their best to reform Denver’s not-ready-for-primetime election system before it faces a real challenge next November. As for voters, we really, really do suggest you use the readily available mail-in absentee ballots next year. Eventually, someone will count them.
