April 18, 2013 04:21 PM UTC

Gessler Loves SCORE, Except When He Doesn't

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• by: Colorado Pols

A pair of fascinating audio clips sent to us today, timely as debate continues on the Colorado Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act, House Bill 1303. The first clip is Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler speaking last January in defense of the SCORE statewide voter registration database. You might recall that last year, the online voter registration interface to SCORE broke down a couple of times–due to capacity issues immediately prior to the registration deadline, and a misconfiguration of a mobile registration portal. Gessler came in for substantial criticism after those failures, so his report back in January was important. According to Gessler, despite these "glitches," the system was an "astronomical success."

The second two clips (all separated by beeps on the audio track) are both of Gessler speaking last Monday in opposition to House Bill 1303. Gessler seems miffed about the criticism he received regarding the trouble with SCORE last October, which he claims to be "proud of"–especially since this is the system to be relied upon even more under House Bill 1303's provisions for voter registration up through Election Day.

But Gessler is between a rock and a hard place–he opposes House Bill 1303, so in the context of his testimony he has no choice but to identify "points of failure" that could be a problem. The same "quarter million people" that amounted to an "astronomical success" last fall could be a disaster now! County clerks offices in chaos! The problems from last fall somehow "compounded" as a result! Gessler concludes by insisting he wasn't given enough funding in this bill to adequately test the system to handle the pressure.

When you put these clips together, the contradiction is painfully obvious. Despite all of Gessler's "testing" before 2012, "glitches" occurred–but the system was still an "astronomical success."

Today, that potential for "glitches" is a dealbreaker? It's nonsense, folks.