DENVER (AP) — Nearly 800 people who registered to vote in Colorado using a mobile device may not be registered and need to confirm their status because of a software glitch, Secretary of State Scott Gessler said Wednesday.
The glitch affects people who used a mobile device, such as a smartphone or iPad, to register to vote from Sept. 14 to Sept. 24, Gessler said.
His office has not been able to identify who those people are to alert them, and officials are “operating under the assumption that we’re not going to be able to figure out” who they are, he said.
The only people who are affected are 779 people who tried to register to vote with a mobile device during those 11 days in September. The issue has the potential to cause headaches for county clerks and can be problematic if there are a lot of close races in Colorado, a battleground state.
Gessler said the glitch happened because of a software fix for the online voter registration website, which was recently optimized for mobile devices. He said his office was trying to fix a problem with the website that was creating duplicate registrations when people hit the “submit” button twice. In the process of trying to correct that problem, the software fix created another one.
“Frankly, our office did not engage in enough user-testing to identify this problem before we rolled out a software fix,” Gessler said. “And I recognize this happens in the information-technology world often, but the fact of the matter is we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and that’s what we’re working on doing here. It was our mistake.”
People can check their registration at http://www.govotecolorado.com .
Left-leaning groups were quick to take the opportunity to criticize Gessler, a Republican, saying he should’ve focused more of his office’s resources on making sure the website worked, instead of his ongoing efforts to find non-citizens on voter rolls. Gessler’s office recently announced that it found 141 suspected non-citizens registered to vote — about 0.004 percent of the state’s nearly 3.5 million registered voters.
“There’s nothing exciting about running a mobile website, but that’s really what the secretary of state’s office should be focusing on and now we have 779 legitimate registrations that have been eaten apparently,” said Luis Toro, director of Ethics Watch, a government watchdog group. Toro’s group has taken the position that partisan elected officials should not oversee elections.
Gessler said it was unfortunate that Toro’s group “prefers taking partisan shots at me.”
“But I’m focused on reaching out to these voters to correct this issue and ensure they can vote,” Gessler said.
The AFL-CIO’s Colorado chapter said it feared many of the people they recently registered with iPads at worksites may be part of the 779. Phil Hayes, the group’s state political director, said they estimate that between 150 and 200 people may be impacted, based on “cocktail-napkin math” taking into account the days there was a glitch.
The group’s estimate could not immediately be verified.
Gessler said people affected who don’t verify their registration and show up to vote could still do so using the state’s emergency registration process, swearing under oath that they had tried to register using their mobile device and were affected by the glitch. Emergency registration is also used when people register during a voter registration drive but their information is never entered into the state voter system.
Gessler said his office has alerted county clerks of the issue and the possibility of emergency registrations.
He said someone in his office identified the problem Monday afternoon, and they immediately switched over to the version of the website they were using before launching the optimized version for mobile devices.
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Find Ivan Moreno on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IvanJourno
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Online:
To Verify Registration: http://www.govotecolorado.com
