DENVER—County clerks began a two-week test of a new statewide voter registration database on Monday to get ready for this year’s elections.
The database is two years behind schedule and this year’s primary and presidential elections will be the first time it will be used across the state. The State of Colorado Registration and Election System, or SCORE, replaces multiple county system and is required by federal voting reforms passed following the 2000 election problems in Florida.
Secretary of State Mike Coffman said the system would be “stressed” to see if any changes should be made to the system before the final version is due next month and to see if election workers need any more training.
“If you hear of issues, don’t be alarmed. We have designed this to be a spring training of sorts,” Coffman said at a news conference at the state Capitol.
Project manager Trevor Timmons said one stress test would be having election workers print out poll books using the registration database.
He said printouts of the system will be used at precinct polling places during elections but vote centers—where voters from anywhere in a particular county can vote—would be using the database live to check voter eligibility during elections. That means most counties will have to go online in the three days between the close of early voting and Election Day to print out poll books.
Timmons said the state has already been doing automated testing of the system to simulate thousands of workers using the system at once. He said that testing will continue after county workers go home and are off-line.
He said election workers will also test the system to make sure they pull up the right ballot for voters according to which precinct and special districts they live in.
Voting activist Harvie Branscomb said it would make more sense to test the load on the system at the same time county workers were online testing it because the combination may produce problems designers haven’t anticipated. He also worried what would happen if two people with the same name and birthday showed up to vote but the database assumed the other had already voted. He said they could be forced to vote by provisional ballot.
“There’s no way to anticipate all problems,” said Branscomb, a member of the Colorado Voter Group.
The original plan was to roll out the database before a presidential election. It should have been implemented in 2006 but the original vendor was fired and work had to begin again.
Coffman signed a new $9.7 million contract with Saber Government Solutions in October and later spent an additional $1.9 million for nine technical workers to work in the field with county workers and to provide greater network support. Coffman said that contract, which lasts until 2010, is on schedule.
