Secretary Of State: Voting Disruption 'Doesn't Affect Results'

DENVER (CBS4)- Secretary of State Wayne Williams said the voting database disruption across Colorado on Tuesday afternoon will not affect the results.

The statewide voter database was unavailable for nearly a half hour on Election Day. Voters were unable to cast ballots in person from 2:47 p.m. to 3:16 p.m. Tuesday. Voters could drop off ballots that had been completed or were given the option to vote with a provisional ballot.

Williams talked to CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass about what happened.

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"The state's voter registration database allows the clerk's judges to know whether an individual has already cast a ballot. And so during the time that database was down, the clerk was not able to issue regular ballots to individuals in line, they were able to issue provisional ballots and those will be counted the same as a regular ballot would be. The other thing that can't happen during the regular time period was that you can't check signatures for the mail ballots so that part got delayed by that 29-minute period. That does not affect how the votes are counted, that does not affect the results, it simply changed what type of ballot some voters had to be issued during that 29-minute period," said Williams.

Clerks were not able to process mail ballots if the signature had not been verified. Those with verified signatures could be processed during that time.

Williams does not believe the system disruption was due to anything external.

Voting continued as planned at polling places across Colorado once the system was back online. The state Democratic party planned to go to court to keep the polls open an additional two hours to make up for the outage.

Williams opposes extending the polling hours. He said it was unnecessary.

Williams also talked about the 5,00 to 8,00 votes in Pueblo that may not be tallied until Thursday.

"For most of the large counties, they plan on the process completing for the day around 1 or 2 and then resuming tomorrow. That's been true for most of the large counties for other elections as well under the new model. It takes longer to process a mail ballot than it does an in-person ballot. Pueblo County has made the decision to use style ballots for their in-person voters. That means those ballots have to be duplicated, that's done by a bipartisan team of judges; it takes a little bit of time to do and to make sure it's done right," said Williams.