Colorado 2008 = Florida 2000?

The Colorado Independent wonders if Colorado will take the crown as the poster child for election day dysfunction this year, pointing to potential problems with a new statewide voter database system and dealing with huge numbers of new voters who have to wade through with the longest ballot in the country.

The State of Colorado Registration and Election system (SCORE) compiles voter information from across the state to comply with the Help America Vote Act. The system, two years behind schedule and millions over budget, automatically cross-checks voter information with other state agencies to verify voter eligibility and ensure more up to date and cleaner voter rolls.

Coloradans have reason to question the reliability of new computer systems. In 2006, a series of computer crashes dubbed “The Glitch of ‘06” contributed to wait times of up to 3 hours in Denver, causing an estimated 20,000 voters to leave polling places without voting.

“I feel pretty comfortable front-end that we’re not going to have the problems we had in 2006,” Secretary of State Mike Coffman told the Denver Post. SCORE has held up in recent tests, but the ultimate challenge comes on election day.

“There is going to be a burden on the system that we have not seen,” Jenny Flanagan, executive director of the nonprofit government accountability watchdog Common Cause, said in the Post.

The surge of new voter registrations in the state — with more than 100,000 in the last five weeks alone — could spell long lines and sow further confusion and frustrations at the polls.

“Because we have had such a massive voter registration effort, we expect to see problems where people think they are registered but actually find they are not at the polls,” says Flanagan told the Independent.

Further contributing to long lines, Colorado voters will be contending with the longest ballot in the nation and the longest in the state since 1912. In 2006, an informal test found voters took between nine and 25 minutes to fill out their ballots. State law says voters have 10 minutes to vote when other people are in line.

To avoid lines on election day, voters in Colorado and elsewhere are encouraged to vote before November 4.

“The way to ease the burden both for the people who run the elections and the people who count the results is to vote by mail or vote early,” Gov. Bill Ritter said last month, a sentiment echoed by county clerks, political campaigns, and nonprofits.

Mail-in ballots have already gone out in parts of the state, and in-person early voting kicks off October 20, meaning it’s too late to avoid the barrage of political ads in the Centennial State.

McCain Attacks Obama in NM Speech

(Getty Images)

Sen. John McCain called Sen. Barack Obama “a mystery, a liar, complicit in the economic crisis and an unaccomplished naïf” in a speech at the University of New Mexico yesterday, writes Marc Ambinder.

“Who is the real Senator Obama?,” McCain asked repeatedly, “purposely trying to fuel lingering doubts some undecided voters have about Obama, who burst on the national scene only four years ago,” said the Santa Fe New Mexican in its coverage of the speech.

Gearing up for today’s debate, McCain appeared to be playing to a national audience without sprinkling in appeals to New Mexican voters. “Except to acknowledge retiring Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who had spoken before McCain arrived, he barely mentioned the state,” said the New Mexican.

The UNM student paper, The Daily Lobo, reported “close to 1,000” people attended the event with about 250 people protesting outside.

McCain’s attack on “the real Obama” centered on Obama’s relative lack of experience and discrepancies McCain sees between Obama’s rhetoric on the economic crisis and his record. “To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did. Nothing, zero, zippo, nada,” he said.

The Obama campaign fired back, describing the speech as “another frustrated tirade” from a candidate down in the polls.

The sharp attack is seen as a preview of McCain’s debate strategy.

But it’s the words of the audience, not McCain, that are drawing some of the sharpest criticism. At points in the speech when asked, “Who is the real Obama?” responses included “he’s a pansy,” “socialist,” “a liar,” and “terrorist.”

Jason Zengerle blogs on the New Republican that McCain missed a “mavericky” opportunity by letting such comments pass:

What if McCain, instead of continuing with his speech, had stopped cold, looked the audience member in the eye, and gently but sternly rebuked him with a homily about how we’re all Americans and the problem with Obama isn’t that he’s a bad man or a terrorist, but that he’s wrong on the issues? Sure, it would have been hypocritical–it’s no coincidence McCain’s supporters think Obama’s a terrorist when you’ve got Sarah Palin accusing him of palling around with one–but it would have been dramatic and mavericky as hell, too.