Pueblo County Clerk Gilbert Ortiz is pained by the idea that his office would fail to send an election ballot to even one county soldier serving in the US Military overseas. He sent a letter Tuesday to Secretary of State Scott Gessler seeking an express prohibition “in writing ” on sending ballots to soldiers overseas who are legally registered but inactive voters.

“I want it on the record because this goes against everything I want to do as clerk,” he told the Colorado Independent. “When in doubt, you send a ballot. I think of those soldiers not being able to vote. They’re on the battlefield. This is not a comfortable place to be.”

Pueblo County, with its forts and training installations, has a high percentage of citizens who are members of the military. Ortiz said he plans on Friday to send ballots to all registered-voter service members– whether active voters or inactive voters– unless directed not to by Gessler in writing. Denver County has already mailed its ballots to both active and inactive military voters. In many cases, the ballots have to travel to far flung combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and then be mailed back fast to be counted in the November 1 election. Ortiz said he feels the clock ticking.

Inactive voters are legal voters who have, for whatever reason, failed to cast ballots in the previous election.

Secretary of State Gessler has argued that current state statutes direct clerks to mail ballots only to active voters. He said mailing out any additional ballots would violate the law. He explained that he wants to make the rules uniform across counties on whether or not clerks mail ballots to inactive voters. He said he was concerned to guard against possible registration fraud.

The Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act

Ortiz consulted County Attorney Dan Kogovsek on the matter and Kogovsek said that Gessler’s interpretation of election law is just plain wrong, that it would force Pueblo County to violate federal law concerning mailing ballots to service members. Kogovsek referred Ortiz to the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act, which obligates county clerks to send ballots to all “covered voters,” which the act clearly defines as all eligible voters in the military; that is, not only “active” registered voters but “inactive” voters as well.

“After consulting with legal counsel, I respectfully submit that your office’s legal interpretation of governing law is incorrect,” Ortiz wrote to Gessler. “Under the State Act, I am legally required to mail ballots to uniformed service members who are eligible to vote, whether or not they are inactive.”

Denver has mailed ballots to inactive voters for the last five years. Ortiz said Pueblo County has mailed ballots to inactive voters for at least the last two years.

This year, only Pueblo and Denver Counties have planned to mail ballots to inactive voters. Two other counties reportedly mistakenly included inactive voters on their mailing lists.

According to a University of Colorado Denver study delivered to the Secretary of State’s office this past February (pdf), 646,000 voters fell from the “active” category to the “inactive (failed to vote)” category after the high-turnout presidential election of 2008. Those “inactive voters” are registered voters who cast ballots in 2008 and did not do so in the 2010 election– roughly 35 percent of the state’s 1,831,000 post-2008 active voters.

In the past, the question of whether or not to mail ballots to inactive voters has always turned primarily on county finance questions. Each county in the state pays for the elections it holds, and so clerks understandably seek to run their elections operations at the greatest possible bang-to-buck ratio. Budget and efficiency considerations balance against the desire to extend easy voter access and expand participation among the public.

Gessler, who has made a career of representing Republican clients in highly partisan election and campaign finance cases, this month sued highly Democratic Denver County to stop it from mailing out ballots to inactive voters, despite the fact that its ballots had already gone out to inactive voter members of the military.

A Gessler-Ortiz timeline

That Gessler’s action in Denver and Pueblo comes so close to the election has raised additional questions about his motives. Ortiz certainly feels deadline pressure but legal analysts are suggesting that so too will the district court hearing the case, which will likely have to rush rulings on the matter.

Ortiz shared with the Colorado Independent a timeline of communication between his office and the Secretary of State’s office on the matter.

His office submitted its election plan to the Secretary’s office in roughly mid-August. On August 31, Secretary of State staffers contacted Ortiz’s office by phone and asked if it intentionally planned to send ballots to inactive voters, to which Pueblo County Election Supervisor Dena Abeyta replied in the affirmative. Two weeks later, on September 14th, the Secretary of State’s office called again and asked the same question and, upon receiving the same answer, directed the clerk’s office not to send out ballots to inactive voters. The next day, the clerk’s office sent the Secretary of State an email asking for a formal letter detailing his order not to send out the ballots. Four days later, on September 19, the clerk’s office received an “unofficial” email with Secretary of State Gessler’s opinion that sending out the ballots would be illegal. On Tuesday, September 27, Ortiz sent his letter to Gessler detailing the legal advice he received from Kogovsek and asking for an official directive from Gessler.

We’re “currently in limbo,” Ortiz wrote to the Independent.

The Secretary of State’s office did not return repeated Colorado Independent calls and emails seeking comment.

The Ortiz letter to Secretary of State Gessler:

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Investigators for the CIR / CPI study– titled “Homeland Security Boom and Bust”– filed a Colorado Open Records or CORA request to uncover a paper trail of documents (download the pdfs here) that reveal city and county officials as amateurishly haphazard in recording and inventorying purchases and keeping track of large and expensive equipment.

Hinsdale County officials purchased a 30 foot trailer for $54,000 in 2004 along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in other security equipment. No one properly inventoried the purchases and when much of the equipment apart from the trailer disappeared, there was little official way to track it. Records describe the trailer as sitting in the lot, emptied out of security equipment and unused for the last four years.

The trailer “did not appear to be used,” writes Joanne Hill, director of Quality Assurance for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security in a deadpan letter adorned with signatures and stamps.

Hill went in search of the $590,000-worth of equipment purchased by Hinsdale with the federal money to fight the War on Terror.

“At the time of our visit to Hinsdale, officials were unsure of the number and location of [All Terrain Vehicles] funded with Homeland Security monies. Officials were unable to locate radios, a bolt cutter and night vision goggles.”

Linda Neinhueser, Gunnison County Finance Director, wrote in a follow up to the initial audit that Hinsdale officials failed to realize that the trailer could be used for “anything other than WMD and Terrorism responses.” They have now put it to use as a general “Incident Command Unit.” She said that some progress had been made in locating missing equipment.

The audit problems were not confined to the state’s Western Slope. According to the documentation, Colorado’s North Central Region was forced to bring in the Arapahoe County Sherriff’s Office to investigate the disappearance of a $20,000 computer server purchased by the Denver Sheriff’s office to support security credentialing. Ultimately unable to find the server, Denver repaid the state.

Sheriff J. Grayson Robinson wrote Mason Whitney, director for the Colorado Office of Homeland Security, to explain.

“Although the Denver Sheriff’s Office conducted an exhaustive search for the credentialing server, the equipment was never located.”

Documents also show that a check in the amount of $1 million from Homeland Security sat unnoticed for more than six months in a “defunct mailbox” at the Colorado office of the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.

Daniel Alexander, director of the department, wrote that the unattended million dollar check was the fault of a previous administrator who had failed to reconcile grants and provide back-up data to his replacement. Alexander wrote that new procedures had been implemented.

In December 2007, the federal office of the Inspector General audited Colorado’s use of Department of Homeland Security funds and found that an appointed committee on homeland security had failed to provide proper guidance to the Governor’s Office. The Inspector General auditors found that from 2003 to 2006, $7.8 million in expenditures failed to comply with Homeland Security guidelines.

In 2008, Gov. Bill Ritter created a new cabinet-level position to address the kinds of problems that had plagued the state’s handling of Homeland Security funds.

The author of the report, CIR’s G.W. Schulz writes that billions have been spent by the federal government in the name of homeland security since the 9/11 attacks and that “chunks of that cash have gone to all 50 states and hundreds of localities as part of a grab-bag of federal grant programs.”

Some of the other discoveries:

Another $54,000 trailer sat abandoned behind a fire station in Michigan.

Louisiana bought dozens of new Dodge Durango SUVs totaling $1.4 million.

In West Virginia, authorities used $3,000 for lapel pins and tens of thousands more went to unallowable overtime.

The nation’s capital region spent $4.6 million on a media blitz to promote readiness.

Homeland Security money also paid for the raids authorities conducted on protesters in Minnesota at the Republican National Convention. Local and federal agents seized laptop computers, cell phones, cameras, supplies for making banners and political pamphlets, according to the report. Eight locals were arrested in the high profile raids. They were charged with “conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism” based on a state law passed after the 9/11 attacks and used for the first time during the convention.
　
From JoAnne Hill, Director of Quality Assurance, Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, 2 September 2008

[...]

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O’Malley’s office has taken “extraordinary measures,” as Wednesday’s news release says, to absorb the so-called “check box” voters. Several thousand individuals statewide have been saddled with an “incomplete” designation for failing to check a box on their registration forms indicating that they would be using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers — rather than a state ID or driver’s license number — as identification. Coffman has refused to provide relief to these voters. The “check box” crowd can still vote provisionally. But unless the voters fix their their forms eventually, the provisional ballots will be tossed.

In addition to sending letters to 1,400 “check box” voters urging them to cure before Election Day, Denver County has allowed these individuals to fix their registrations at the polls and vote by regular ballot.

“After consulting with the Denver City Attorney’s Office it was determined that we would be
within the law in having a voter cure this problem at their polling place on Election Day,” O’Malley said in a press release. “In September, we made several appeals to the Colorado Secretary of State to reconsider his ruling that a voter’s registration is incomplete due to their failure to check an ID box. We feel 1,400-plus voters should not be denied an Election Day ballot due to what is essentially a voter’s technical error.”

Denver County is not the only county to admit “check box” voters. Larimer County and Jefferson County absorbed these individuals into their voter rolls as well, much to Coffman’s chagrin.

Coffman released a statement saying that Denver “was irresponsible” not to run the plan by him, according to the Denver Post. He said he intends to ask Attorney General John Suthers about the issue; Suthers’ office has backed him in his “check box” stance in the past.

(Photo/mystereys, Flickr)

The clock is ticking down until Colorado’s big day. And with the John McCain campaign all but pulling out of the state as Barack Obama pushes forward, the result of the November election in Colorado may be coming into focus.

Unfortunately, when it comes to election administration in Colorado, things are getting muddier and muddier by the day. In our election bungle roundup last week, we guided you through the week’s most important news: national groups slamming Secretary of State Mike Coffman on his voter registration policy, Attorney General John Suthers backing Coffman in his recent voter purge, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink further disenfranchising student voters, and more. Read on to for the latest foul-ups:

Come one, come all! Vote early! Vote by mail! Oh, wait…

This Monday kicked off the start of two weeks of early voting in Colorado. Long-touted as the antidote to massive Election Day lines, Monday’s early vote went smoothly, according to The Rocky Mountain News. But not so with another type of voting. County clerks across the state found their offices gummed up with mail-in ballot requests and unable to quickly deliver ballots to waiting voters. In Adams County, election workers were put on mandatory 12-hour shifts this week to deal with the avalanche of mail-in forms, as the Rocky reported. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State’s office added an election tracker on its Web site complete with the ever-increasing number of mail-in ballot requests. Now you can watch the inundation unfold in real time.

Think you’re registered to vote? The answer depends on where you live.

A few county clerks got feisty this week by accepting some incomplete voter registrations onto the rolls. According to the Rocky, Jefferson and Larimer counties absorbed registrations with the so-called “check box” issue, in which applicants wrote down the last four digits of their Social Security numbers but neglected to check a box indicating as much. Other counties have been rejecting these forms until the applicant cures his or her registration, per the secretary of state’s wishes. Coffman, who has ignored voting experts’ pleas to change his policy, issued a wrist-slap to the clerks, telling them to follow the law, according to The Denver Post. Meanwhile, Denver County has pulled out all the stops to get “check box” voters to cure their forms before Election Day. The most recent attempt? Robocalls.

A little extra oversight on Election Day? Not for those of you in Arapahoe County…

Voting rights experts aren’t the only ones fretting over Colorado’s ability to pull off the national election. Early this week, U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Democrat who represents Arapahoe County, sent a letter to Secretary of State Coffman asking him to pick an independent election monitor to survey the Arapahoe County polls on Election Day, according to The Denver Post. Perlmutter specifically worried that the county — which will use electronic voting machines this election — is unprepared to deal with machine failures, and he asked Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder Nancy Doty to stock paper ballots at the polls. Traditionally Republican Arapahoe County has seen a huge increase in Democratic registrations this year, and Perlmutter said he wants things to go smoothly on Election Day. But in keeping with his no-way-no-how reputation, Coffman rebuffed Perlmutter, saying in a letter that he won’t post a monitor “unless there are concerns submitted to my office that election laws in Arapahoe County are not being adhered to,” according to the Rocky.

The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition recently launched a vigorous vote-from-jail campaign. And while some counties have been more receptive than others, in Denver alone the number of voting inmates quadrupled from 20 people in 2004 to 80 this year.

“People were really excited,” says CCJRC re-entry coordinator Carol Peeples. “They said, ‘Thank you.’”

In spite of the increased interest, voting from jail is no easy task. First of all, not everyone who wants to register to vote is eligible to do so. In Colorado, felons and felon parolees are barred from voting. People who are on probation may vote. And those in jail awaiting trial or serving time for a misdemeanor crime may also vote.

The CCJRC Web site recommends that eligible detainees re-register to vote, even if they had signed on previously, because “there is a good chance that your name was removed from the Secretary of State’s list of registered voters.”

Many eligible inmates never register to vote, however, because they lack the right identification. Major Vicki Connors at the Denver County Jail estimates that 400 of the facility’s 2,000 inmates are eligible to vote. Some inmates asked a family member to bring a driver’s license or a state identification card to the jail, while others gave jail staff permission to go through their property and find an ID. But many had no paperwork whatsoever. “Quite a few didn’t have any ID, not even on the outside,” she says.

Connors and Peeples appealed to Secretary of State Mike Coffman to allow inmates to use their booking sheets — which include a photo and a birth date — as identification in order to register. But, according to Peeples, Coffman denied the request on the grounds that the sheet doesn’t include a residential address.

Coffman’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

“The rule of thumb is if it is not acceptable on the outside, then we can’t use it on the inside,” says Connors. “It was like we were going over and above [the call of duty], and that is against the rules.”

Connors says she facilitated voting for inmates in other ways. She posted CCJRC pamphlets around the jail and distributed voter affidavit forms to interested inmates, who then returned them, along with a photocopy of an ID as well as the registration form, to the county clerk.

When inmates receive their mail-in ballots, they must fill them out in the jail library, since they can’t have pens elsewhere in the building. Then they use money from their own commissary funds to pay for the ballot’s $1.17 in postage.

“You know what? They have rights,” says Connors, explaining her willingness to help inmates to vote. “They have due process. They have not been convicted. And the people who have already been convicted don’t lose their other rights, like the right to medical attention, or the right to due process. It is my job to make sure that everyone gets what is coming to them.”

Not everyone across the state is as enthusiastic. In Arapahoe and El Paso counties, for instance, jail officials don’t inform inmates of their voting rights unless they ask.

“From a resource standpoint it is not something that we can do. We can’t provide them more information at this time,” says Lari Sevene, public information officer for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

But Connors says that helping inmates vote reverberates beyond the ballot box.

“There was one person who won’t go to court until several weeks after the election. Technically, he is absolutely eligible to vote,” she says. “But this guy has 19 charges against him. This will be the last time ever in his life that he will vote, for sure, guaranteed. You know, you think about that when you are in the Department of Corrections. You think about what you gave up.”

(Photo/unquiet, Flickr)

With Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman unwilling to budge on incomplete voter registrations, several counties across the state have come up with partial resolutions on their own.

The ever-evolving “check box” drama has to do with the state’s new voter registration form. Applicants without a state ID or a driver’s license must indicate as much by checking a box and then giving the last four digits of their social security numbers. But at least 6,700 new would-be voters–and as many as 10,000 by one estimate — neglected to check the box. Several thousand have since cured their applications, but many more remain barred from voter rolls.

While counties throughout the state have warned “check box” applicants to fix their registrations before Election Day, a few localities have gone above and beyond. According to the Rocky Mountain News, election officials in Larimer and Jefferson counties absorbed the incomplete registrations into their rolls, asking only that these applicants show IDs at the polls to vote.

Coffman decried the practice. “It is absolutely essential that election law be uniformly applied to every voter across this state and anything less than the equal treatment of all voters compromises Colorado’s ability to hold fair elections,” Coffman told the News. Despite mounting pressure from state and national voting rights groups, he has maintained that applicants must cure their registrations to appear on the rolls.

Meanwhile, elections officials in Denver County have deployed a robocall to remind applicants with incomplete registrations to cure their forms before Election Day. “We will work hard to get these voters in our poll books come Nov. 4,” Clerk and Recorder Stephanie O’Malley said during a conference call with reporters this morning.

Denver fielded around 4,000 incomplete voter registration forms (this includes those with “check box” and other problems), and all but 1,400 of those have been cured. O’Malley said that she asked Coffman’s office about placing these individuals on the rolls anyway — as Larimer and Jefferson counties have done–but was met with a resounding “no.”

“It was an effort on our part to have inclusivity, but the Secretary of State’s office, standing firm on the letter of the law, said we could not place these applicants on the poll books.”

But counties are not the only ones that need to address the issue. One voter registration group set up an online database with the names of every person with a problem application in the state. New Era Colorado, which registered 12,000 voters in the state, urges people to use the searchable database to make sure they’re not on the Secretary of State’s incomplete list.

“[Coffman] can and should issue a directive to the county clerks to allow anyone with a valid identification to vote in Colorado,” New Era Colorado’s executive director, Steve Fenberg, said in a press release. “In the meantime, New Era Colorado will at least provide the information to voters so they can complete their applications. Voting in a democracy is too important to let anyone lose their right because of misinformation.”

Applicants who don’t cure their registrations before Election Day may vote by provisional ballot. These ballots are tallied in the two weeks following the election. However, provisional voters must still fix their registrations for their votes to count.