(jtowns, Flickr)

Last week, voting rights experts scored a win to protect these voters who were removed from the rolls by allowing them to vote by provisional ballot. The Advancement Project, a national voter protection organization, filed suit against Secretary of State Mike Coffman for illegally removing as many as 30,000 voters after a 90-day no purge federal deadline. In a settlement, Coffman agreed to provide provisional ballots to purged voters who show up at the polls on Election Day. These special provisional forms will be verified before any others in the two weeks after the election.

But that doesn’t solve one central problem: many purged voters simply don’t know they’ve been canceled. Coffman has directed county clerks to remove people from the rolls in order to ward against voter fraud. The secretary has an arsenal of reasons to bump individuals. But within 90 days of an election, he may only remove felony convicts, deceased people or those who request to be taken off. In its suit, the Advancement Project alleged that Coffman illegally removed eligible voters within the 90-day no purge period. The list includes people who have moved or those whose registration cards bounced back to county clerks, among other individuals.

In order to let the canceled folks know about their status, at least one organization has published a list of purged voters in Colorado and several other states. Project Vote, a nonpartisan civic engagement group based in Washington, D.C., culled the names and addresses of newly registered voters who were removed from the rolls. The organization compiled the data on a Web site, urging people to peruse the database for friends and family and alert them to call their county clerks about their registrations. Project Vote did not return phone calls seeking clarification on how it obtained and compiled its list.

However, The Colorado Independent called several people on the list and found that many of them already fixed their registrations and have voted early or by mail. These people did not find out they were purged by elections officials. Rather, they double-checked their registrations and learned of the problem on their own.

Librarian Bob Benhoff's diligence paid off. His voting rights were restored after erroneously being 'cancelled' by the Arapahoe Clerk & Recorder when he moved.

Several weeks passed and Benhoff became worried when he didn’t receive any election-related documents in the mail. He decided to check his registration online. “It is a combination of things,” he says, explaining his vigilance. “I didn’t get a Blue Book [the Colorado Legislative Council's ballot guide]. I had heard a little bit about the purging thing. I like to double and triple check.”

Benhoff plugged his information into the Arapahoe County Web site, but he didn’t show up as a registered voter. Then he called Clear Creek County to see if he was still on their rolls. He wasn’t. “Clear Creek said I was dropped from their rolls because I had moved. So I guess Arapahoe County notified them but then I got purged sometime after that.”

Benhoff called Arapahoe County to explain the problem. A clerk asked him to come to the office with a receipt to prove he had registered. Luckily, Benhoff had kept the receipt from that day in the library and he was able to fill out an emergency registration form. He voted by mail last week. But he remains perplexed as to why he was dropped from the rolls.

“If I was purged, my initial question is: Why? People have alleged that this is illegal. I can’t think of any reason why I would be legally purged.”

Another voter has a similar story. Loretta Williams, an 82-year-old mother of five, re-registered to vote in August when she moved to an assisted living facility in Arapahoe County. When the Colorado Independent phoned Williams, she did not know that her name appeared on the Project Vote list and she referred questions to her daughter, Kerri Gray.

Loretta Williams, left, with her granddaughter, Jessie, and daughter, Kerri Gray. Williams was purged from the voting rolls due to an apparent foul-up by the post office, which mistakenly returned an Arapahoe County voting confirmation card as undeliverable.

“At that point, I knew we had a problem,” says Gray, stressing the importance of the election to her mother and her family. “One of the things that has been motivating my mom to stay alive is this election. That is one of the reasons she is here.”

Gray phoned Arapahoe County. The clerk looked up Williams’ information and saw that her voter confirmation card was returned to sender and that she was struck from the rolls. Colorado law mandates counties to remove any voter applicants whose confirmation cards bounce back to the county within 20 days in order to verify that person’s address. The Advancement Project challenged the legality of this so-called 20-day rule in its suit against Coffman, but the settlement did not address the law.

Gray says that the clerk on the phone guessed that the post office was to blame since Williams’ address was listed correctly on the form. And though the clerk agreed to reinstate her mother, Gray was shaken up. “I was in tears,” she says, “I said, ‘I am not going to have to tell my mom that she can’t vote.’ That would be the last thing this year I could handle.”

Williams has since received her mail-in ballot. Gray says she will help her mother fill it out since she is blind in one eye, and she plans to hand-deliver it herself. “I don’t trust anybody,” she says, adding that she wishes someone had contacted her mother about the problem. “It would have been good to at least have a phone call. It was just luck. It was me being very engaged and trying to watch out for my mom.”

But many other purged voters won’t be so lucky. Coffman had another 146 names removed from Colorado’s rolls last week, prompting a federal judge to order Coffman to desist. These people join the thousands-long list of individuals who will get the ultimate Election Day surprise when they’ll learn they can’t vote by regular ballot.

(Photo/Joe Gratz, Flickr)

A federal judge took a swipe at an “obdurate” Secretary of State Mike Coffman this afternoon by ordering Colorado’s top election official to stop violating federal law by purging voters.

The Advancement Project, a voter protection organization, filed suitagainst Coffman late last week for canceling as many 30,000 voters within 90 days of the federal election, a breach of the National Voter Registration Act. Coffman’s office settled with the Advancement Project late Wednesday evening, agreeing to let purged individuals vote by provisional ballot. But he has removed an additional 146 voters from the rolls since then.

The Advancement Project hauled Coffman back to court this afternoon after the secretary told the Rocky Mountain News that he was still purging voters. “The process is continuing” he said, adding that the plaintiffs, which included Colorado Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota and the Service Employees International Union, “did not prevail . . . in stopping us from moving forward with additional cancellation through this election.”

Not so fast, said U.S. District Court Judge John Kane this afternoon. He demanded that Coffman “cease and stop” purging voters immediately.

“I don’t think there is anything deliberate about this, but possibly something obdurate about the secretary’s comments” in the Rocky Mountain News, Kane said.

Jessie Allen, senior attorney with the Advancement Project, said she was “concerned that the defendant may not listen to his counsel” and continue canceling voters just days before the election.

“If the defendant is not listening to his counsel, he will be listening to me personally,” said Kane. “I don’t issue threats idly and I am not issuing a threat now. But I expect [the order] to be obeyed.”

Kane also told Coffman’s counsel, Deputy Attorney General Maurice Knaizer, to look into reinstating the 146 voters who have been purged in the last day and a half.

Jenny Flanagan, director of Colorado Common Cause, called today’s ruling “necessary and critical to protect our election.” She saidthe plaintiffs feared that Coffman might conduct mass purges before the election.

According to the initial complaint, the Colorado Republican Party requested an additional 17,000 duplicate registration records purged just last week. Even though Coffman told the Rocky Mountain News that he won’t do it because the election is too soon, today’s order has put those concerns to rest completely.

“You have Coffman grandstanding in the media, saying he is going to do whatever he wants anyway,” says Flanagan. “That is the outrageous part. We were concerned that Coffman would continue to ignore what the court was ordering and the protection that the voters were afforded.”

The Wednesday settlement — reached after eight hours of deliberation — allows purged individuals to vote by provisional ballot. These provisional ballots will be verified and counted before others in the two weeks after the election. Counties must “presume” these voters eligible or provide convincing proof that they are not in order to toss their ballots.

The secretary of state’s office cancels voters for many different reasons. Some newly registered voters are kicked off because the county can’t verify their addresses when registration cards bounce back to the clerks. Others are deleted because they have moved. And duplicate registrations are canceled as well.

But under federal law, the secretary of state is prohibited from removing voters within 90 days of an election unless that person has requested to be taken off, has died or has been convicted of a felony.

(Photo/unquiet, Flickr)

It’s not over yet. With Election Day just around the bend, questions about Colorado’s ability to pull off the big event have only mounted in recent days. Over the past two weeks, the Colorado Independent has published a Friday digest of the most important election administration news of that week. We’ve steered you through all sorts of wreckage: county clerks defying Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman in accepting incomplete voter registrations, Coffman admitting that he purged thousands of voters from the state rolls, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink trying to stop students from registering, and on and on and on.

In our third and final installment of our election snafu roundup, we’ll tell you the latest bungles. You’ll have to read on for more. But since it’s Halloween, feel free to insert your own tired cliche about how the state’s election administration is looking spookier than ever. Trust us, you’ll be accurate.

A prayer for you purged ones …

Thousands of voters who were kicked off state rolls will now be able to cast a special provisional ballot. That’s according to a settlement reached by voting rights experts and the secretary of state’s office this week. The Advancement Project filed suit against Coffman late last week to force him to reinstate as many as 30,000 voters who were allegedly illegally removed from the rolls. But after a grueling eight hours of deliberation in the federal courthouse on Wednesday, both sides agreed to a different temporary fix. The purged voters will be able to vote provisionally. Their ballots will be verified before any others in the provisional stack in the two weeks after the election. But the story doesn’t end there. Coffman told the Rocky Mountain News that he’ll keep purging voters as long as he sees fit.

UPDATE: The Advancement Project is hauling Coffman back into court over the continued “cancellation” of voters. An emergency hearing has been scheduled for 1 p.m.

Oh, here’s your mail-in ballot!

Denver County elections officials were perplexed last week when thousands of mail-in ballots they had ordered went unaccounted for. But early this week they solved the case of the absent forms. Turns out that the ballot vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, was at fault because of a glitch in its data file. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the 18,000 missing ballots were delivered to voters, who had to scramble to mail them in on time.

Dude, where’s your ID?

Forget glomming through your mail-in ballot to find the coveted “I voted” sticker. Nearly 36,000 first-time voters may have their ballots tossed out because info jotted down on their new voter registration forms doesn’t match state data sources that clerks’ use to verify identification.

Instructions contained inside the mail-in ballot packet asks new voters to provide a copy of their driver’s license or other state-approved source, like a utility bill, to prove their identity. But voters, cited in a Rocky Mountain news story, argue there was no ID directive or the color-coded envelope contradicted the fine print on the ballot materials. New voters, who did not include an ID verification with their mail-in ballots, are urged to contact their County Clerk and Recorder immediately to ensure the ballot will be counted.

Electronic voting? Shmelectronic voting.

A Denver-based electronic voting test site was suspended this week for failing to meet federal standards. SysTest labs was charged with testing two types of electronic voting machines for use in future elections. But the federal Election Assistance Commission put the operation on ice because it failed to employ qualified people or keep a record of its testing, among other problems. One of the machine types evaluated at the site, Premier Election Systems (formerly known as Diebold) has come under scrutiny in Adams County for alleged vote-flipping.

Denver welcomes you poor, huddled incomplete voters

Denver County lent a hand to voters with incomplete registrations this week by allowing those folks to fix their forms at the polls and vote regular ballots. Several thousand new voters statewide failed to properly fill out their registration forms by neglecting to check a box indicating that they would be using the last four digits of their social security number as ID. Voting rights groups pressured Coffman to accept the so-called “check box” voters into the system, but Coffman did not relent. Now, these voters who live in Denver will be able to vote like everyone else.

(Photo/Monocle, Flickr)

The Advancement Project, a national voter protection group, filed suit against Coffman late last week to force the secretary to reinstate the voters and halt any new purges. Coffman’s removals included people who moved, inactive citizens, and newly registered individuals whose voter cards bounced back to county clerks. The Advancement Project claimed that Coffman’s removals violated the National Voter Registration Act because they occurred within 90 days of a federal election. Coffman denied any wrongdoing.

But with the general election less than a week away, both sides agreed to a preliminary fix during a Wednesday hearing. After deliberations that stretched more than eight hours, the Advancement Project and its plaintiffs — Colorado Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota and the Service Employees International Union — gave up on restoring purged voters to the rolls. Instead, they agreed to let them vote by provisional ballot.

“It was important for these voters to have their voices heard and to not be turned away on Election Day,” said Grace Lopez Ramirez, director of Mi Familia Vota after the settlement. “They’ll be counted and identified.”

The crux of the settlement has to do with the way these provisional ballots will be treated. Under federal law, anyone who shows up at the polls but can’t be identified in the state’s voter database may cast a provisional ballot. Those forms are investigated in the two weeks after the election. If it turns out that the person is an eligible voter, then the vote will be counted. If not, then the ballot is tossed out. The Wednesday settlement essentially prioritizes the purged provisional voters. County clerks will have to assume that the voter is eligible until proven otherwise.

In order for the counties to identify the purged provisional voters, the secretary of state will give them an electronic list of voters canceled between May 14 and Nov. 4, 2008. In a small win for the voting rights advocates, those groups got to use their own list of purged voters, rather than rely on Coffman, whose purge list is much shorter.

Though the secretary of state didn’t cop to any wrongdoing with the settlement, U.S. district court judge John Kane on Wednesday said he thinks “there are places where the state went out of bounds on the removal of these names.” But he agreed with the defendant, that changing the voter rolls just days before the election could portend technical problems and even chaos.

During the hearing, the Advancement Project provided witnesses who were wrongly purged from the voter rolls and then never alerted to the fact. Linda Townsend Johnson and her husband, James Edward Johnson, recently moved to Colorado Springs from Mississippi and registered to vote in May. The couple — Linda is in a graduate program while James works as a security officer — requested mail-in ballots so they could take more time to learn the issues in their new state. The mail-in forms arrived. But soon after, Linda got a call from a woman at the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York public policy institute, asking Linda if she was aware that she had been purged.

“She said that my name and my husband’s name had been taken off. I said, ‘I have my registration card and mail-in ballot and everything.’ She said, ‘It appears that your name has been taken off.’”

Linda and James went to the El Paso County clerk’s office to sort out the problem, bringing their paperwork with them. A woman at the clerk’s office told them that they were not registered to vote. “I said, ‘I don’t understand,’” said Linda. “‘Someone made a mistake.’ I laid out my voter registration card, and I gave her my social security number. She said she didn’t understand what happened. So she fixed it.”

The woman also told Linda that if she had cast her mail-in ballot without fixing her registration, then the ballot would be tossed. That assertion, the court hearing revealed, turned out to be false.

No one ever told Linda and James why they were purged.

“Nobody would explain it to me,” she said. “This is my right. This is my voice, and I don’t think it should be taken from me. I don’t take this for granted. I am an African-American, and I am a woman. I don’t take for granted that people suffered for me so I could have this right.”

Later on in the hearing, however, a witness from the defendant’s side explained exactly what had happened to the Johnsons’ missing registrations.

Linda and James, it turned out, were canceled because another Linda and James Johnson had registered in the state. Those registration forms were returned in September rather than May. They featured a different address than the original Johnsons’ forms, and they were filled out in strikingly different handwriting. Yet the El Paso County clerk and recorder’s office tossed out Linda and James’ registrations anyway.

According to Hilary Rudy, the witness who serves as a legal analyst with the secretary of state’s office, things got even more complicated when the second Johnson registrations were tossed out because of the so-called 20-day rule. The Colorado law stipulates that if a voter card sent to a newly registered voter bounces back to the county clerk, than that person must be removed from the rolls. The policy is meant to confirm an applicant’s address, but the plaintiffs claim that it too violates the NVRA, since it kicks off voters without sufficient notice. In Michigan, the Advancement Project and the American Civil Liberties Union recently successfully sued to stop a similar practice in that state.

After the hearing, Linda said she was happy to have spoken in court about her registration. “I knew I was going to do something about that,” she said. “I teach my kids, ‘Don’t stay silent when something is wrong.’”

But the voting rights advocates say that not everything is perfect.

“A settlement is always a partial win,” said Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project. “The case is not over.”

Hair said that the group plans to contest the 20-day rule and other purges at a later date.

(Photo/joebeone, Flickr)

Thousands of Coloradans have been denied the right to vote because of a policy that may violate federal law.

Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman has authorized county clerks to purge newly registered voters under the so-called 20-day rule. Here, county clerks must send non-forwardable letters to newly registered voters. If the mail bounces back to the clerks, then they must remove the voter applicants’ names from the rolls.

Voting rights advocates say that the policy violates the 1965 National Voting Rights Act. The Advancement Project, a voter protection organization, filed suit on behalf of several other groups against Coffman to halt the practice and reverse course on other voter purges. According to the suit, 3,291 of these 20-day applicants have been removed since August 2007.

“We consider these voters to have been registered when they are entered into the SCORE database,” Jenny Flanagan, executive director of Colorado Common Cause told the Colorado Independent, referring to the state’s new voter database. “They have met the other requirements for registrations and they are taken off when the cards are returned. There are examples of when there could have been an error.”

Individuals ejected by the 20-day rule are among the 30,000 purged voters that make up the basis of the lawsuit. According to the complaint, Coffman also canceled duplicate registrations and registrations of people who moved. The NVRA specifies that the state may only cancel three types of voters within 90 days of a federal election: deceased people, felony convicts, and those who withdraw their own names.

Flanagan, who is also a plaintiff in the case, says that the 20-day rule is subject to human fallacy. A would-be voter might make a mistake on his or her own address on the form. But so could a registrar at the clerk’s office when entering the data. Postal employees aren’t immune to slip-ups either.

“We believe that it should not be allowed any time,” she says. “There are efforts to protect voters during this election, but there are some long term solutions we are seeking. We want to end this practice of canceling registrations and get the state in compliance with the NVRA.”

The NVRA does allow for voters to be removed from state rolls, but only after county clerks have sent a forwardable mail confirmation and waited two election periods to see whether the voters shows up to vote, according to Sarah Brannon, staff attorney with the Fair Elections Legal Network, a group acting as legal counsel on the lawsuit. “[Applicants] can’t be removed within 20 days,” she says.

Brannon says that the 20-day rule doesn’t disproportionately affect one population or another. But a Colorado Independent report published earlier this month showed that homeless people in particular are impacted by the legislation. Many homeless voters register using shelters or day centers as their mailing address. Counties send confirmation forms to these locations. But if homeless people don’t turn up within a week or two to pick up the mail, shelters typically return it to the sender. Which means that the homeless individuals are struck from the rolls.

Colorado isn’t the only state with a 20-day rule on the books. In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Advancement Project — the same group bringing forward the suit in Colorado — successfully challenged a similar law; the state was ordered to stop purging voters whose confirmation cards were returned to county clerks.

The case will be heard on Wednesday afternoon.

Coffman’s office did not return repeated requests for comment. He has defended his purges in the past; Attorney General John Suthers has also backed Coffman, saying that the cancellations did not violate the NVRA.

The organization filed suit on behalf of Mi Familia Vota, the Service Employees International Union and Colorado Common Cause, a group that has been highly critical of Coffman’s election administration.

The groups claim that Coffman violated the National Voting Rights Act and purged between 16,000 and 30,000 voters. Some newly registered voters were removed because voter confirmation forms sent to their addresses were returned as undeliverable. Others were removed because of duplicate registration, felony conviction, death or one of several other reasons. The groups say that Coffman disregarded the NVRA by purging would-be voters within 90 days of the federal election. Some individuals — like felons, for instance — may be purged within this period, but the voting rights groups say that Coffman illegally removed 20,000 registrations that should have been left on the rolls.

The lawsuit seeks to reinstate voters who were removed from the rolls in the 90-day no-purge period, except those who were taken off in accordance with NVRA standards. And the suit also seeks to bar any purging of eligible voters between now and Election Day.

Coffman’s purges came under national scrutiny after a New York Times report revealed that his office may have improperly removed 37,000 people from the rolls in the three weeks leading up to the Aug. 12 primary election. Coffman disputed the article, saying that 14,049 had been purged, though he thought some of them may have been taken off after the deadline. But Attorney General John Suthers’ office later affirmed Coffman in his removals, saying that purging duplicate registrations is permissible within the 90-day period.

The voting rights groups aren’t buying it.

“These purge programs violate a federal law that is intended to protect eligible voters from being swept off the rolls,” said Penda Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project in a press release. “The state admits engaging in these practices and purging thousands of voters’ registration records without notice. We felt that filing this action was the only way we could ensure that thousands of Colorado residents would not show up at the polls on Election Day only to find they could not participate in this historic national election.”