This afternoon, the Secretary of State announced that SCORE, the statewide voter registration system was down briefly. It’s back up and the election is back on, but our sources tell us that the reason the system was down wasn’t just an average malfunction, but that the system was under attack from potential hackers. The Governor’s Office of Information Technology’s network failed. The down time occurred when the Secretary of State’s office had to switch networks from the Governor’s OIT network to the network that the Secretary of State implemented as a backup because the SOS office believed that the Governor’s system didn’t have the necessary safeguards.
This isn’t the first time that the Governor’s office has come under fire for it’s lack of IT preparedness. The Governor’s revamp of the state IT system, called CORE, was launched even though it was not ready and would not work as designed. From a KDVR news report earlier this year:
“Gessler sent a letter to Gov. John Hickenlooper on May 6 asking that he delay launching CORE until the major glitches are repaired. We reviewed a copy of the letter which calls the computer project “a disaster in the making” and warned ‘this current path to failure is a train wreck about to happen.'”
SCORE is back on track, but just another reason to consider not voting for Hickenlooper – his own computer system may have shot his campaign in the foot. But, what we really want to know is who wants the election data so badly that they’re trying to hack into the system? Maybe a better question would be – who doesn’t? Tick tock, can’t wait for seven o’clock.