Constitutional Law

Colorado Voters Could Face Major Election Day Troubles, Watchdog Groups Warn

Colorado’s newly implemented electronic voter database system could seriously hamper the hundreds of thousands of new voters seeking to cast ballots on Election Day, public interest watchdog groups tell The Colorado Independent.

The database system, Statewide Colorado Registration and Election (SCORE), was created to help the state comply with the federal Help America Vote Act, which was passed in 2002 by Congress to guard against voter disenfranchisement. SCORE is supposed to compile voter information and help voters sign into polls on Election Day. But Jenny Flanagan, head of Common Cause, a Colorado nonprofit election watchdog group, told The Independent that, “Because we have had such a massive voter registration effort, we expect to see problems where people think they are registered but actually find they are not at the polls. With the close of registration we see massive amounts of forms coming in and the counties have to process those forms and be in touch with any voter that might have a problem.”

Sarah Brannon, a staff attorney with the Fair Elections Legal Network, expressed concern about the electronic voter database system’s ability to handle the scores of voters on Election Day. “People will be using the system throughout the course of the day to check voters into the system,” she said. “So there is a question of whether there will be an overload of use.”

State officials are charged with entering voter information into SCORE, and yesterday The New York Times reported it appeared that about 37,000 eligible voters had been purged from Colorado’s rolls within 90 days of the general election. The Help America Vote Act makes it illegal for state officials to purge voters from its rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, responding to The Times, denied that voters had been improperly purged from its rolls, but announced that he was asking the state’s attorney general to investigate state officials’ procedures for entering and removing names of voters from the database.  

Full post as published by ACS Blog on October 10, 2008 (boomark / email).