Weld Clerk wary — for now — of how voter registration machines will work

Click to Enlarge Steve Moreno Weld County Clerk and Recorder Browse Our Galleries

Andrew Villegas, (Bio) avillegas@greeleytribune.com
May 8, 2008

Comments Print Email

Weld County Clerk and Recorder Steve Moreno said Wednesday that he's worried that federally mandated statewide election registration machines may not be up to task by themselves for this year's looming elections.

Moreno's comments come just days after county clerks and officials statewide finished simulated elections that Moreno said pinpointed some problems in the statewide SCORE system -- the State of Colorado Registration and Election system.

Chief among Moreno's concerns is that among the 40 election judges he had working on laptops trying to access the system simultaneously during the mock election, many faced delays as long as 30 seconds that Moreno attributed to computer network slowdowns. Waiting 30 seconds may not seem like long, Moreno said, but it means big delays for people lined up to vote.

"We believe it is going to be a great system (someday)," Moreno said. "We're nervous about this system being test-driven in a presidential election."

Unfortunately for Moreno, all counties in Colorado must use the SCORE system this year for both August'sprimary and November's presidential elections.

The system keeps an electronic list of registered voters in the state and makes sure those voting are eligible to do so by using driver's license and Colorado Department of Corrections records.

Saber Corp. -- the Oregon-based developer of SCORE -- has promised software updates and other fixes to SCORE to make things run smoother, but Moreno said any updates will require new simulated elections that could jeopardize Colorado's ability to carry out the elections in all the state's counties.

Moreno added that another simulated election will probably take place across all of Colorado's 64 counties in late May or early June after Saber issues a new software update.

To combat the problem, Weld will use the state's SCORE system as well as Weld's own "Legacy" system in redundancy to register voters this year. Moreno said officials in Douglas and Adams counties will probably do the same thing with their machines.

When Moreno recently met with many county clerks about the system, Moreno said he asked all of them if they think the system will work.

"I said, 'We gotta know now if we can do this,'" Moreno said. "And they said 'Yes, we can.'"

The problems with the SCORE system are the latest in a string of vote-counting problems facing Colorado this year. In late 2007, Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified thousands of electronic voting machines in the state -- but none in Weld. After many county clerks around the state decried Gov. Bill Ritter's failed plan to use all paper ballots in 2008's elections, Coffman recertified many of the machines.