Clerk and recorder solution has many flaws

By Jan Tyler
Rocky Mountain News
January 13, 2007

Surprise! Denver is hosting an emergency election on Jan. 30. Why so fast? City leaders are hoping to capitalize on voter anger about the Election Day debacle of 2006. And they don't want to give voters time to consider fully the merits of their so-called solution.

For instance, they don't want voters to dwell on the fact that the city has hired Sequoia Voting Systems to provide ballots and other services for this election.

Sequoia was responsible for the shoddy e-pollbook software that broke down last November, making voters wait for up to three hours at the polls. Sequoia was responsible for incorrectly printing and mailing 44,000 absentee ballots with the "yes" and "no" boxes transposed. Sequoia was responsible for misprinting bar codes on absentee ballots, delaying the vote count for weeks after the election.

Sequoia was responsible, but city leaders refuse to hold Sequoia accountable.

City leaders claim that having an elected clerk is better than having an election commission. However, serious election problems have arisen over the last two election cycles in Douglas, Montrose, El Paso, Arapahoe, Boulder and other counties with an elected clerk.

City leaders claim that the proposed change will give Denver voters a "single point of accountability" for elections. Proponents don't like to admit, however, that the elected clerk will not be directly responsible for managing elections. Rather, the clerk will appoint a director of elections to handle management and operations. The proposed change will not give voters the ability to choose who runs Denver's elections.

Denver voters already have the power to throw out lousy election commissioners at the ballot box. In fact, Denver voters will have a chance to do so in May as long as they don't change the city charter on Jan. 30.

City leaders have given little thought to how, exactly, the city will carve out all current clerk and recorder duties, combine them with the existing election agency, and create a new super-agency independent of the city governance structure. City leaders act as if it's a matter of merely moving a few desks.

Before voters were asked to approve restructuring the city auditor's office to create a new chief financial officer, exhaustive analysis had been conducted and detailed plans were in place.

For the proposed transformation of the clerk's office, not one organizational analysis or management audit has even been suggested. It would be reckless to approve blindly a structural change of this magnitude.

After the November 2006 debacle, the city hired an outside consulting firm to study specifically what went wrong on Election Day. The consultant's 32-page report cataloged failures of software, equipment and planning, and made recommendations for preventing a repeat of the voting disaster. The report did not recommend a change in the structure of election governance in Denver.

The report concluded: " . . . there is no intrinsic reason why these missteps need be repeated in 2007 if practical, prudent steps are taken to prevent them."

Yet instead of taking practical steps, city leaders are making political noises, forcing a hurry-up vote to get rid of the election commission.

Heat-of-the-moment political solutions to administrative problems usually have unintended consequences, and the proposed charter change is no different.

Still, city leaders want to say that they "did something" about elections. The Jan. 30 vote is something.

Problem is, there's a big difference between doing "something" and actually fixing what's broken. Please vote no on Referendum 1A.