An ominous-sounding letter that El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink sent to a journalism student at Colorado College has reignited a three-week old controversy over his past erroneous assertion that out-of-state college students are not eligible to vote in Colorado.
Amid growing concerns of voter suppression in El Paso County, Ralph Routon, the editor of the Colorado Springs Independent altweekly newspaper, has published an open letter to Gov. Bill Ritter “strongly encouraging him to step in and do something about Colorado’s worsening election crisis.”
El Paso County is Colorado’s most-populated county. It’s also, undeniably, a GOP stronghold with a rich legacy of political hijinks and shenanigans — usually inspired by Republicans. And that leaves plenty of progressives leery that, come Election Day, Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink will do everything he can to make it difficult, or at least unpleasant, for non-Republicans to vote.
Which leads us to Democrat state Sen. John Morse’s claims of Balink’s 12-point strategy to suppress the vote.
In Colorado, the state with the longest ballot in the country, 215,000 new voters have signed up since January. The woman in charge of the state elections department, Holly Lowder, resigned just weeks ago, after her cozy personal relationship with the beneficiary of several state election-related contracts surfaced. Lowder’s boss, Secretary of State Mike Coffman, is himself the target of longstanding ethics complaints and is overseeing an election that he is also running in — to replace retiring Congressman Tom Tancredo. And, oh yeah, Colorado could be the deciding state for the presidential election.
Hold on tight. It could be a bumpy ride.
Colorado College, a liberal arts school in Colorado Springs, is oft seen as a cradle of progressive thought in one of the most conservative cities in the United States. In recent years, that designation has caused some tension in the greater community. This week, the antagonism came to a head with a prominent State Sen. John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) accusing Republican Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink of deliberately trying to stop Colorado College students, many of whom come from out-of-state, from voting.
Colorado’s Attorney General John Suthers, along with Republican National Convention delegates Rep. Kent Lambert, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink and El Paso County Commissioner Wayne Williams are sending dispatches to the Colorado Springs Gazette on their birds-eye views from the convention floor in St. Paul — including reports of how the swing state of Colorado is proving to be a big hit.
Three weeks after losing a rematch in the 5th Congressional District primary, Republican Jeff Crank is in St. Paul vending a T-shirt that warns against electing Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Featuring the familiar Obama logo with an added mushroom cloud, the “Obama bin Biden” shirts have generated plenty of interest at the Republican National Convention, Crank tells Politicker CO’s Jeremy Pelzer.
There’s no shortage of analysis on the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a challenge to Indiana’s law that requires voters to present a government-issued photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Some of it correct. Some of it not.…
An e-mail exchange between Secretary of State Mike Coffman and his then-elections technology manager Dan Kopelman elevated the specter that hordes of illegal immigrants are attempting to vote in Colorado.
The communication, intercepted as part of an open records…
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