Colorado polls closed at 7 p.m. as scheduled, despite an earlier computer glitch, after a Denver judge denied a last-minute bid by Democrats to extend voting.
Still, anyone in line at 7 p.m. will be allowed to vote.
Colorado Democrats are seeking a court order to keep the state’s voting centers open an extra two hours Tuesday night because of a system failure earlier in the day.
Unless a judge orders otherwise, polls are set to close at 7 p.m. The party’s filing says it wants voting centers open until 9 p.m. A Denver District Court judge had heard arguments on extending voting in Colorado, and was deliberating as of 6:40 p.m.
Chris Meagher, a spokesman for the Colorado Democratic Party, said officials had filed for an injunction in court late Tuesday afternoon.
Meagher said the filing was in direct response to the “intermittent outages” of the state’s voting system earlier in the day.
“We just want to make sure that everyone who wants to vote has the opportunity to vote,” Meagher said.
The state’s voter registration confirmation system briefly failed shortly before 3 p.m. Tuesday, momentarily crippling voting and forcing a small number of voters to cast provisional ballots.
On Tuesday night, the Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that another problem had affected access to the same system about 10:30 a.m. In that instance, she said, about two-thirds of election judges processing ballots and voters were kicked off the system and had to login again — a step that took up to 26 minutes for some.
Together, the two problems with that system dealt a setback to county election officials who were trying to count mail ballots all day.
Lynn Bartels, the spokeswoman for Secretary of State Wayne Williams, issued this statement Tuesday night on the Democrats’ attempt to extend voting hours, while the hearing was still happening: “We are opposed. This outage didn’t stop anyone from voting. We have had two weeks of voting and everyone got a ballot. We have no reports of long lines and anyone (already) in line at 7 can still vote.”
The party’s seven-page complaint says: “This is an emergency action for immediate injunctive relief to remedy statewide, systemic breakdowns on the State’s voting system on Election Day. The source of these breakdowns is as yet undetermined but appears to be the result of failures within the computer servers of the Secretary of State’s office.”
The filing says the outage resulted in “substantial delays at polling locations across Colorado, and those delays have the potential of disenfranchising voters who were unable to vote during the regular voting hours today.”
A briefing filed by the Democrats speculated that the system “has crashed or locked up or become overloaded or may have been the target of external system intrusions.” State officials said they did not believe an external attack on the server, or hacking, was responsible for the system outage.
Williams and Denver Clerk and Recorder Debra Johnson are listed as defendants in the complaint.
The voter registration system last went down at 2:47 p.m., according to Bartels, who confirmed the outage at 3:13 p.m. With the system down, county election clerks could not process mail ballots whose signatures had not already verified already or confirm the identity of residents voting in person.
At 3:16 p.m. — 29 minutes later — the system came back online and clerks reported that normal voting resumed. The secretary of state’s office is investigating the problem.
An unknown number of voters cast provisional ballots while others decided to wait for the system to return to working condition. In Denver, the number of provisional ballots cast was believed to be “less than 30,” Bartels tweeted Tuesday night, while in Arapahoe County, 66 provisional ballots were issued.
Williams decided against considering an extension of voting hours because of the problem. “No one was prevented from voting at that time,” Bartels said. “Nobody was denied anything.”
In La Plata County, the system went down for about 10 minutes.
Erin Hutchins, the election administrator there, said the hiccup meant that officials had to issue two provisional ballots at the Durango office. But she said everything was working fine by about 3:20 p.m. “We’re back up, rocking and rolling,” Hutchins said.
Elections officials in Denver and Mesa County, on the Western Slope, both said they lost access to the system for more than 20 minutes but were returning to normal.
In Mesa County, election workers at seven voting centers were instructed to offer provisional ballots to voters in line. But most people didn’t want them, said Amanda Polson, the elections director.
“We were offering them, but as far as I know, only a very few people took us up on it,” she said. “Others were willing to wait.” She knew of one voter who decided to leave the polling place.
Denver offered a small number of provisional ballots before the system was restored.
Angela Myers, Larimer County’s clerk and recorder, said the system outage impacted her polling centers for less than 20 minutes.
“Really, no big effect,” Myers said about 3:30 p.m. of the outage’s impact on voters. “Our longest wait time anywhere right now is 24 minutes at the courthouse. People who were there to vote, it was a delay in processing.”
Here are the official statements from the Colorado secretary of state’s office:
MEDIA: With SCORE down, clerks can't process mail ballots; in person voters must vote provisional. #copolitics
— Lynn Bartels (@lynn_bartels) November 8, 2016
MEDIA: Clerks can't process mail ballots that need to have the signature verified. if that has been done, they can continue. #COpolitics
— Lynn Bartels (@lynn_bartels) November 8, 2016
MEDIA: I have been told that the voter registration system is back up. Carry on. #copolitics
— Lynn Bartels (@lynn_bartels) November 8, 2016
This story will be updated. Staff writer Jesse Paul contributed to this story.
