November 30, 2006 08:47 PM UTC

Will it Stick on Hick?

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

The failure of the Denver Election Commission has become the story that just won’t die (nor should it), but will it be the issue that finally puts a major dent in the armor of Denver Mayor “Teflon” John Hickenlooper? As the Rocky Mountain News reports:

Denver’s Election Day debacle was caused by custom Sequoia software that was “very poorly designed and fundamentally flawed,” a consultant said Wednesday.
“It does not meet or even approach professional standards,” said Fred Hessler, of Fujitsu Consulting, in his first report to Mayor John Hickenlooper’s task force examining the election mess.

Hessler was reporting on voter registration software that slowed to a crawl and stopped, causing three-hour lines and leading an estimated 18,000 citizens to give up their attempt to cast a ballot.

Hessler said his team had 100 users open the first log-on page of the software, and it slowed when only one person logged on. He said that’s because the program started accessing the database with that first page, and it should not…

…”Ninety percent of users did not exit correctly,” he said. The software failed to close these open sessions even after three hours.

“These are not minor oversights or errors,” he said. “This is Programming 101.”

The software was not stress-tested before the general election either by Sequoia or Denver, he said, even though it was so unstable it could not be used to train poll workers. Instead, they were trained on paper.

What do you think?

 Loading ...