What really happened on Election Day 2006

Denver hired Fujitsu Consulting to assess the city's November 7, 2006 election. Fujitsu submitted a detailed, 32-page report explaining exactly what went wrong and why. (Read the pdf file here.)

The report makes several recommendations to ensure that Denver does not have another Election Day debacle. The report does not conclude or even suggest that the structure of election governance in Denver needs to change.

The report's recommendations include:

• Follow basic project management principles...rehearse actionable contingency and mitigation strategies...conduct proper risk management....
• Invite a third-party auditor, perhaps another County's election staff, to verify readiness prior to the next election, and do so in time to permit course correction.
• Simulate turnout and capacity of projected voting centers well in advance of the next election....
• Provide significantly enhanced communications methods for election judges to contact the DEC with problems and emergencies.
• Provide a reliable source of waiting time information at each polling place for use by the public.
• Improve responsiveness of the voting center supply chain by increasing delivery capacity.
• Train election judges in multiple roles to reduce voting center staffing vulnerability to attrition and no-shows.

The recommendations are straighforward. But the mayor and other city officials are ignoring them. Instead, they insist that the DEC must be scrapped and elections must be buried in the Clerk and Recorder's office.

The report concluded: "While the DEC did commit errors in logistics, planning, and (especially) quality assurance and oversight, these mistakes are by and large easily preventable with additional effort, diligence, and some tactical procedural modifications. While significant factors in 2006, there is no intrinsic reason why these missteps need be repeated in 2007 if practical, prudent steps are taken to prevent them."

Instead of following simple, practical recommendations, city officials are pursuing political changes that will do nothing to solve Denver's voting problems.

The proposed charter change will not fix what went wrong on Election Day '06.

Read the Fujitsu report here (pdf)