City election panel blames delays on software glitches

By Ann Imse And Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News
November 9, 2006
Tens of thousands of Denver voters stood in lines for hours on Election Day because of glitches in new, barely tested custom software for checking voter registration, according to the election commission's technology chief, Anthony Rainey.

Rainey called the glitches normal for newly developed programming. "There's no perfect software out there," he said.

"It's brand new software. That's what the problem was. No one else has used it."

While Denver election judges had to wait up to 20 minutes for a response from their new program, Larimer County - the first in the nation to begin using vote centers three years ago - got answers from their system in 30 seconds.

And while Denver spent $85,000 on its custom electronic poll book from Sequoia Voting Systems, Larimer County used common, off-the- shelf software that cost virtually nothing.

Larimer used existing county- owned computers and ordinary Microsoft Access software that came with the machines. The county tied them to an Oracle database program it already owned. A county staffer, retired aerospace engineer Thad Pawlikowski, put the system together.

County Clerk Scott Doyle said, "I just don't know if we had any costs associated with this."

When other counties ask for help, Larimer simply gives them its electronic poll book. "We're happy to help," Pawlikowski said.

Doyle and Pawlikowski were unable to say Wednesday if Denver ever asked for it. Rainey could not be reached late in the day on the question.

Another issue in Tuesday's debacle in Denver: huge numbers of non-Denver voters trying to vote outside their county, said election commissioner Sandy Adams.

That's not allowed. It's not even possible unless Denver had registration lists for the whole state.

Adams, who worked the electronic poll books Tuesday, said the commission did too good a job of telling people they could vote at any of the new vote centers, instead of their own precinct. Outsiders heard the message, too.

"I can't tell you the number of voters I had to turn away (from other counties) because we said, 'You can vote here, vote now, anyplace,' and they didn't realize it didn't apply to them," she said.

This year, the commission switched from requiring Denver voters to cast ballots at small, local precincts, and instead allowed them to use any vote center in the city. Therefore, instead of checking a short printout, election judges needed to check any voter's registration at any vote center. Judges also had to mark the database to show that the voter had cast his ballot, so he could not go to another vote center and do it again.

All new programs have such glitches, not found until put to use, Rainey said. "Microsoft finds them every day, and they're the biggest software company in the world."

He said the city received the Web-based program in August and used it in the primary election. But only 12,000 people voted, far fewer than on Tuesday.

So the software was never tested with 220 laptops trying to access 100,000 records in one day until the election, because there was no way to do that until you had 100,000 people show up, Rainey said.

"There's an unfortunate expectation that the Denver Election Commission is going to have perfect software. Right now, I'm getting hate mail from folks who don't even know what's going on," said Rainey, who said he has more than 20 years' experience as a network and software engineer.

Rainey said the software, which was based on the city's main computer network, overloaded when 7,000 city employees logged on when they arrived at work.