The Colorado secretary of state’s office is attempting to determine how many voters have been unable to register or update their registration information using mobile devices to access the state’s GoVoteColorado.com site, a spokeswoman said Friday.

The secretary of state’s office says it’s still determining which combination of devices and browsers led to the problem, which in an unknown number of cases led to voters believing they had completed their transaction when state voter rolls hadn’t registered their intended changes.

The office discovered the problem as the March 1 caucuses approached, when voters logged onto the site to verify their registration or determine where they were supposed to caucus and discovered that updates they thought they’d made weren’t reflected in the voter registration system and then contacted the secretary of state’s office, officials said.

But an initial investigation led election officials to believe the problem was confined to “a very isolated group of people,” elections director Judd Choate told The Colorado Statesman. In all, state elections workers identified just 14 voters statewide who had started a transaction on a mobile device but hadn’t completed it in the period from October through January, according to the system’s internal records. (Jan. 4 was the deadline to register, affiliate or update registration information in order to attend precinct caucuses.)

The secretary of state’s office contacted county party leaders throughout the state on March 1 to warn them that some voters might believe they had changed their registration — registered to vote, changed an address or changed their affiliation — even though the voter rolls wouldn’t reflect the changes.

“We’re willing to give the voter the benefit of the doubt, and that’s what we’ve advised the counties to do,” Choate said hours before caucuses started.

Denver County Republican Party Chair Sue Moore notified GOP officials throughout the county about what she termed the “glitch” on the afternoon of March 1 in an email.

“Since we have no way of verifying this information tonight, I encourage you to take people at their word and allow them to participate, even if they don’t show up on the list,” Moore wrote. “We will do our best to verify voter information before County Assembly/Convention on March 19th so we don’t allow ineligible delegates to participate.”

But a subsequent investigation by the secretary of state’s IT department determined that the problem was likely more widespread than initially thought and didn’t necessarily involve mobile users dropping their connection or “user error,” officials said. On some phones, officials said, users were unable to scroll to the find the “submit” button on the form, so couldn’t complete the necessary final step and didn’t realize they’d missed anything.

“The mobile device world is constantly changing and we are working to ensure this does not occur again,” Secretary of State Wayne Williams said in a statement Friday. “Once the specific individuals who may have been affected are identified, I have directed that we individually contact each voter.”

While his office is sorting out the extent of the problem, visitors to the GoVoteColorado.com site — whether they are browsing on a mobile device or desktop — are being directed to a version of the site that isn’t optimized for mobile devices but is “fully functional,” a spokeswoman for Williams said.

— ernest@coloradostatesman.com