This is not to criticize the hard working election judges who worked non-stop from 5:15 in the morning until after 9:00 p.m. checking people's registrations and helping them vote.  But the fact that they have to put in such long hours is, I think, a major part of the voting problem that Denver must solve.

At the vote center where I was stationed, the laptops that the election judges used to access the city's voter registration records crashed several times, including one occasion when all four laptops were down for a half an hour and 25 to 30 voters left the center.  But from about 5:30 p.m. on, the laptops did not crash, and still there was a huge wait to vote.  The bottleneck was just the time it took for the four election judges who were trained on the laptops to process all the voters.  I believe that if we had eight judges instead of four, and a database that could handle the load of all of those ID checks happening at once, there would have been no problem.

I've read some commentary that maybe Denver shouldn't have gone to the vote center concept.  I disagree with that.  Not only do vote centers eliminate the problem of people having to cast provisional ballots because they showed up at the wrong precinct, moving to the vote center concept helps alleviate the problem of just not enough people volunteering to be election judges.  Go back to the precinct concept, and you will need election judges (and poll watchers) in hundreds of precincts instead of 55 vote centers.  If you're going to have to increase the number of election judges, you might as well stick with the vote center concept, maybe increase the number of vote centers, but definitely increase the number of election judges with laptops who can process people so they can vote.

And I think that is going to involve consideration of allowing election judges to work in shifts.  By late in the evening the election judges were getting pretty hungry (a local store donated some bags of chips and bottles of water, so there was some relief on that) and tired.  I mentioned to one judge that they were really putting in some long hours and he remarked that Denver probably won't change the policy requiring election judges to put in 14-hour or longer days until somebody dies.  It shouldn't come to that -- the national embarrassment of our botched election and the possibility that discouraged Denverites who didn't vote kept Democrats like University of Colorado Regent at-Large candidate Steve Ludwig from winning their elections should be enough. (Ludwig says it ain't over yet.) The Denver Election Commission needs to train and equip enough election judges to handle the vote, and I think that means letting the judges work in shifts so that it is not such a hardship to volunteer.

Cross-posted at SquareState