How Will We Know Who Won Colorado's Electoral Votes?

Denver -- As a "swing" or "battleground" state in the 2008 presidential election, Colorado has been playing with fire in its handling of the statewide election process. Recent elections, especially in the Denver area, have been full of problems, perhaps most notable when both computer and process components were not up to the task and voters waited in line late into the night and early morning before casting their ballots - or went home without voting.

Taking a page from the national Election Assistance Commission, which has seen turnover at the top due to unanticipated problems, Denver's Clerk and Recorder, Stephanie O'Malley was quoted as asking for "patience" for the "unprecedented" number of mail ballot requests coming in for the presidential election (180,000) in Denver, though the local and national trend should have been no surprise.

Problems in the previous elections may have exacerbated the problem with mail ballot requests also. Likewise with electronic voting machines, ballot counting capacity and other functions, the state repeatedly comes up short at each election, and fails to adequately plan for the next, asking for voter patience and cooperation instead.

This year, additional problems have surfaced as the voter rolls have been purged of tens of thousands of names, resulting in a lawsuit questioning the practice. An agreement kept the situation from being bound up in court through the election date.

PBS' Frontline program, in a review of Barack Obama and John McCain's political histories, noted the importance of voter registration review when they revealed that Obama's Illinois State Senate seat was obtained by having the candidacy petitions of the other candidates reviewed and ruled invalid, so that he ran unopposed, after having been soundly defeated previously for a State Representative seat.

Voter watchdog websites have listed other problems in Colorado's system, including multiple problems with vendor Sequoia Systems, which the state has not been able to replace due to the time consuming process of finding another vendor, they said. Most recently, Sequoia Systems was reported to have failed to deliver thousands of absentee ballots to Colorado.

What are the chances that difficulties in Colorado's voting processes will affect the outcome of the national election? Most people think of Florida's situation in the 2000 election as an example indicating the chances could be quite good. With the frequency of candidate visits to the state and the national news focus during the days just before the election, it seems Colorado will likely be in the spotlight. Potential registration problems, voting and scanning problems, voting machine problems and the likelihood that any long delays, especially in Denver, would benefit Obama, who knows where this all could lead.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Colorado_voting_issues

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/18/voting.problems/index.html

"Deluge of requests slows mail ballots", Myung Oak Kim, http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/oct/21/election-official-pleads-patience/