“We’re batting around a lot of different ideas,” state Representative Crisanta Duran, D-Denver, told the Colorado Independent. “We’ll be looking at where there’s common ground. We’ll be talking with county clerks to find the best way to reach out to voters and to establish a system where all Coloradans have equal access to the political process.”

Duran was speaking generally about conversations taking place among members of the Democratic caucus in the state House, but she added that she’s confident there would be bipartisan support for any well-crafted bill that fairly addresses the question raised by Secretary of State Scott Gessler when he sued Denver County last month to prevent Clerk Debra Johnson from mailing ballots to legally registered but “inactive” voters.

“The overall goal has to be to facilitate the right to vote. Voting is an American value that people cherish. Expanding the franchise is the goal,” said Duran. “I mean, we have GOP county clerks like Sheila Reiner in Mesa County who agree that Gessler’s action was an overstep.”

Gessler, a Republican who made a career as a private attorney championing partisan interpretations of election and campaign finance law, argued that state law requires clerks mail ballots to only active registered voters. Gessler said he was seeking to prevent fraud but he supplied no evidence that any fraud had occurred in Colorado in recent elections, much less fraud that suggested mailing ballots to inactive voters in any way increased the likelihood of fraud.

Inactive voters in Colorado are those who have registered but who have failed to cast a ballot in the previous even-year election.

Roughly 2.4 million Coloradans voted in the presidential election of 2008. The 2010 midterm election, however, drew only 1.8 million voters. There are now roughly 1.2 million voters categorized as inactive in Colorado. A disproportionate share of those inactive voters live in Democratic Party dominated Denver County.

Mailing ballots to inactive voters has been demonstrated to increase participation. Voters are much more likely to cast ballots they receive in the mail than they are to track down a ballot or request one to complete and return.

In Denver last year, Clerk Johnson estimated that mailing to inactive voters translated to 10,000 votes. That same year, Democratic US Senator Michael Bennet defeated Republican Ken Buck by only roughly 15,000 votes statewide.

On October 7, Judge Brian Whitney threw out Gessler’s lawsuit, ruling that the Secretary of State’s interpretation of election law in the case was insupportable. Gessler has not said whether or not he plans to appeal the decision.

That Gessler’s actions seemed rushed and even slapdash bolstered the impression among legal analysts and members of the press that Gessler was acting baldly to suppress votes in the state, joining Republicans in states coast to coast who this year have spearheaded an historic raft of similar efforts.

Maps of inactive voters in Denver broadcast by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow highlighted the fact that Gessler’s injunction against mailing inactive voters ballots, had it been upheld, would have overwhelmingly affected minority voters in the city, voters with less access to the internet, for example, who move often and who are clustered partly in Representative Duran’s House District 5.

“I’m watching this very closely,” Duran said. “This is just incredibly important. There’s no reason why legally registered voters should have to jump through additional hoops.”

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The lawsuit describes Andy as taking “a special interest in plaintiffs Dean and YCR because he is a secularist and/or atheist and gay activist with a politically left ideology who despises people of faith.” However, Andy’s award-winning coverage of YCR has received wide praise, including the Society of Professional Journalist’s (SPJ) first prize for Best Continuing Coverage. SPJ stated that Andy took “an even-handed approach into a weighty subject sure to provoke controversy from various standpoints.”

We read your comments, tweets, Facebook messages, and emails and know you agree that Andy’s coverage, along with the rest of the reporting by The American Independent News Network, is excellent. You can help ensure that our work continues by making a donation today to support The American Independent News Network and our Legal Defense Fund.

Make no mistake: This suit is a direct attack not only on us but on the very idea of a free and independent press, as well as an attempt to silence journalists like Andy who expose the views of people like Bradlee Dean. In short, this is a frivolous and blatant attempt to chill free speech.

They think that because we are a small, non-profit organization we will be forced to back down; they think by threatening us with a lawsuit, we will stop. They are wrong. We stand behind Andy and our coverage completely, and know you do too.

The American Independent News Network fully intends to fight this suit and to continue our reporting. You can help us do both by making a donation to our Legal Defense Fund today.

By making a donation you are helping to provide us with the resources to withstand such challenges and to continue our work of advancing and protecting the common good. Your donation can help take a stand for freedom of the press and against the suppression of dissent through dubious legal means.

Hanaa Rifaey is the publisher of The American Independent News Network, the parent organization of The Colorado Independent.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler

Maddow introduces the segment by saying that Gessler’s efforts to reduce voter turnout in Colorado is part of a concerted, sustained national attack on voting.

“Sometimes it comes down to one person, one official, doing what he or she thinks is the right thing, and doing it right now,” she said about Ortiz’s decision to mail ballots to American soldiers serving overseas.

She said Ortiz was in the courtroom Friday when a judge ruled that county clerks in Colorado could mail ballots to inactive voters, and that he immediately got on the phone to his office and ordered that the ballots be sent.

Ortiz did not return a call seeking further comment.

Gessler’s rise to national prominence began when he sued Denver’s clerk and recorder in order to force her not to mail ballots to inactive voters. Gessler said he was trying to ensure fair elections, which he said would not happen if some counties mailed to inactive voters and others didn’t.

Critics of the move, though, saw it as an effort to reduce voting by Democrats and minorities and as such saw it as part of a national effort to reduce the number of such voters prior to the 2012 election.

Pueblo Clerk Ortiz joined the lawsuit as a defendant, and held off on mailing ballots to soldiers and other inactive voters until Friday when a judge ruled the ballots could go out.

The Campaign for a Healthy Denver said today it is “outraged” that voters most affected by a lack of paid sick days could be prevented from voting on Initiative 300, a measure to allow all Denver voters to earn sick leave.

“Denver’s inactive voters – disproportionately lower-income, Latino and African American voters – could be excluded from receiving mail-in ballots for the November 1 election if Secretary of State’s Scott Gessler’s lawsuit against Denver City Clerk Debra Johnson is successful. A recent study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research show these are the workers least likely to have paid sick days,” said a release issued by the campaign today.

“Workers without paid sick days are the voters most likely to face barriers to voting if Secretary Gessler has his way,” said Grace López Ramírez, Mi Familia Vota Colorado State Director and spokesperson for the Campaign for a Healthy Denver. “The idea that voters with the most at stake would not have an opportunity to have their voices heard runs counter to everything we Americans believe about democracy.”

The Campaign for a Healthy Denver is not alone in its dissatisfaction with Gessler’s lawsuit, which seems to pick up new defendants and new critics by the day.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow dedicated a significant segment of her show to the issue earlier this week.

It is rare that a Colorado Secretary of State makes the news. Correction: It used to be rare. Scott Gessler has a gift for drawing attention to himself and his office. This week, he’s been featured on Rachel Maddow’s national television show, written about in The Wall Street Journal and editorialized against in The Boulder Daily Camera.

No word yet on whether he’s seeking higher office but there are certainly Republican candidates for president getting less press than Gessler.

From The Boulder Daily Camera:

When Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler was running for office, he emphasized his deep commitment to voting access, especially for Colorado members of the military who would vote from afar.

But according to the Pueblo clerk, many of Colorado’s military members are among those swept up in the battle between the Denver clerk and Gessler. If those troops didn’t return their ballots in the last general election they, and tens of thousands of registered Colorado voters who didn’t vote one time, they are considered inactive and will not get ballots to vote in a mail-only election.

The showdown between the Denver clerk, intent on sending out ballots, and Gessler heads to court Friday. The Denver clerk’s office said data shows people of color, Democrats and unaffiliated voters will be the voters most impacted by Gessler’s interpretation of the law.

Gessler has been an extremely partisan secretary. Right out of the gate, he said he wanted to work a second job, moonlighting for a law firm that is very active representing conservative candidates and political interest groups. Months later, after his office levied a fine to the Larimer Republicans for campaign violations, he reduced that $48,700 original fine to $15,708. He then became the guest star of their own fundraiser to pay off the fine.

When asked about the propriety of that — would he attend a similar fundraiser by a county’s Democratic party — he replied to a Denver Post reporter: “It would have to be an organization I’m philosophically aligned with.”

Well nifty. We have a man driven by his political alignment to ethically questionable lengths in charge of all of Colorado’s voters. Boulder County’s Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall chose not to fight alongside Denver. There are about 24,600 registered voters in the inactive/failed to vote category in Boulder County. Only about 1,000 of those appeared to have moved away, according to her office’s postal records research.

Even the Wall Street Journal is in on the act.

The battle is over what to do with 55,000 registered voters—nearly 20% of the electorate in Denver—who failed to cast ballots in the 2010 general election, skipped two municipal elections earlier this year and then ignored several letters from the city clerk asking them to call, email or go online to update their registration. Under state law, these people are classified as “inactive” voters

Litigation between Gessler and inactive voters, represented by the Denver and Pueblo county clerks, could be decided next week.

“Denver is doing the right thing and Scott Gessler should not be able to stop Clerk Debra Johnson from sending ballots to legally registered voters,” said Jenny Flanagan, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, which Wednesday joined the suit on the side of defendant Denver County Clerk. Pueblo County also joined the suit on Denver’s behalf Wednesday.

“The right to vote is a fundamental right of every citizen.” said Flanagan.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow skewered Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler last night, relying heavily on the work of the Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic in a report titled “Things to Sue in Denver When You’re Suppressing Votes.”

She showed a map comparing areas of Denver with the most inactive voters to a map showing areas of heavy Hispanic concentration, and guess what? They match.

Gessler last week ordered Colorado’s county clerks not to mail ballots to inactive voters, actually filing suit against Denver County. Pueblo County Clerk Gilbert Oritz wrestled publicly with the question of whether to follow Gessler’s order or not, saying it seemed wrong–and possibly illegal–not to mail ballots to active duties soldiers who had been deemed inactive. Ortiz finally said he would comply with the order, but today joined Denver as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Indiana Republican lawmakers stripped funding from Planned Parenthood last month and in doing so made contraception unaffordable for thousands of Medicaid patients. The battle over the law in Indiana is another high-profile example of the way Republicans, in seeking to pass sweeping anti-abortion bills, have unveiled a longstanding antipathy among a growing bloc of Republican lawmakers to the kind of basic family planning that the vast majority Americans have come to embrace instinctively as a modern-world human right, according to Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“People now know what we’ve been trying to tell them for years and in my case for decades,” Pelosi told the Colorado Independent earlier this spring. “People can see it. The actions and the legislation they’re pushing make it very clear that these [Republicans] are against family planning and contraception. For years, we have not been able to get a vote on the floor [of the House] for even benign issues of women’s health because [Republicans] tie them all to the abortion issue.

“They have taken this to such an extreme place that it has awakened women in America and people who care about women’s health,” she said.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt is reviewing the Indiana law and is expected to rule by the end of the month. The intent, ostensibly, was to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood as the “leader in the abortion industry,” as proponents of the law have put it. Yet federal statutes already bar public funding from paying for abortions, including at Planned Prenthood, and it is illegal to prevent Medicaid patients from using their coverage to receive the non-abortion services and drugs, such as pap smears, pre-natal care, cancer screenings and birth control pills, that Planned Parenthood is also a leader in providing. Medicaid administrators have sent a letter to Indiana saying as much and the Justice Department has similarly informed Judge Pratt.

Since the law passed last month, Planned Parenthood has been paying for women on Medicaid in Indiana to receive care but strapped clinics are likely to shut down soon.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told Medicaid patients that health services are available at other clinics. As media outlets in the state have reported, however, clinics designed to treat poor women will be few and far between once Planned Parenthood is taken out of the picture.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently reviewed the new Indiana law and talked with Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood of Indiana.

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DeGette told the Colorado Independent that the Republican position, adopted widely in the states and in the capital, is untenable, that Americans don’t support it and that it has gridlocked women’s health issues in Congress.

DeGette heads the congressional pro-choice caucus and has been leading the defense against anti-abortion legislation this year.

“People come up to me in church,” she said. “They ask me if it’s really true that Republicans were going to shut down the government over funding for family planning.

“‘Yeah they would have,’ I said.”

It hasn’t always been this way. DeGette said extreme social conservatives have backed GOP lawmakers into a corner.

“What the far right does is they say everything is about abortion. If you’re cutting Planned Parenthood, pap smears, breast cancer screenings, that’s all related to cutting abortion.”

Even though that messaging strategy has been very successful, DeGette believes it will ultimately fail.

“Average American women, they might think Well, I’ll never need an abortion, but if you say to them ‘These lawmakers want to shut down Planned Parenthood,’ then women say, ‘Wooah. I just went there for my annual exam. I don’t have money for health insurance.’ So this affects women right where they are.”

DeGette said the general stand taken now by Republicans, where family planning is equated with abortion, has made it “very hard for people of good intent” in Washington to work together to bolster women’s health.

“There’s a real bipartisan tradition of pro-family planning. On the board of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains there are many Republicans,” she said. “But in Congress, Republicans are being pushed not just into an anti-abortion position but also into an anti-family planning, an anti-birth control position.”

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Western Republicans have traditionally exhibited a libertarian bent. They like small government, genuinely small government, the kind that intrudes as little into their lives as possible. Those kind of conservatives have looked on with shock as Republican lawmakers heady with victory since November have sought as a top priority to expand government reach and draw on more taxpayer cash in a controversial bid to limit access to abortion around the country. In Wyoming, the reddest of red states, the two Republican parties are battling for the soul of the party. So far, the small government Republicans are winning there.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow zeroed in on the battle Monday night. She argued the Wyoming battle highlighted a larger tug of war at the heart of contemporary Republican politics, which she described as an “ideological wobbliness” at the center of the party that will shape Republican election politics in 2012. The big government Republicans lost last week in Wyoming, where Republicans (there are few Democrats in the Wyoming legislature) voted down an intrusive anti-abortion bill. But as the news coming from Washington these days– where abortion and planned parenthood and gay marriage lead the GOP agenda– suggests the big-government Republicans will dominate the national party in the year and a half leading up to the presidential election.

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Maddow talked with Wyoming lawmakers Sue Wallis and Lisa Shepperson. The two women lead the charge against the abortion bill put forward by their colleague Bob Brechtel. Shepperson pointed out the skewed philosophy guiding Republicans who on one side voted against federal health reform legislation because it inserted government into the private sphere and limited choice and on the other side voted in favor of state intervention into women’s reproductive health care in order to limit choice and guide citizen decision-making.

“When I go to the doctor, it is the most private thing you can imagine. I want myself, I want my husband and I want my doctor there. I don’t want any government there…. The doctors don’t need to be told by any of us… I mean we don’t even know what we’re talking about. All I’m asking is that we keep government where it should be and that’s out of the doctor’s office.”

Wallis took her analysis a step further, pointing to the paternalism of Brechtel’s proposal.

“What this bill does is say that, as a woman, I’m not smart enough to know the decision I’m making, that somehow the state is required [to intervene] in this particular decision, where [the state] is required in no other medical decision.”

Shepperson and Wallis agreed that Republicans should refocus.

“I was taught that government should protect us from each other but government goes wrong when it starts protecting us from ourselves. We as competent adults can make those decisions for ourselves. That’s not the role of government in my mind. I really wish Washington would focus on things that will make a difference to our economy.”

Wallis said the November victories were not a referendum on abortion and gay rights.

“I just think it’s a huge mistake… I think the sea change that happened [in November] was all about the economy, all about opportunity, and really has nothing to do with these restrictive, oppressive social issues.”

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There was never a pimp. O’Keefe, who plead guilty last month to misdemeanor charges related to his entering Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans under false pretenses, never posed as a pimp in the ACORN offices. On the contrary, Hannah Giles posed as a frightened prostitute and O’Keefe mostly posed as Giles’ law-student boyfriend who was trying to help rescue her from an abusive pimp. The two told tragic stories to win sympathy from the ACORN workers but they later edited the tapes to make it seem that the ACORN workers were criminals. They were not criminals. They were set up, just like the mainstream media and the American people were set up.

Indeed the mainstream media including the New York Times stood by the story and kept reporting it as if it were real even though the only sources on the story ever drawn upon seemed to be the deeply controversial activist tapes themselves, the activists authors of the tapes and the right-wing impresario of the hoax, Andrew Breitbart.

Aghast, Friedman hectored New York Times editors and public editor Clark Hoyt to run corrections and to stop reporting the story incorrectly. He was unsuccessful. Hoyt wrote a series of emails to Friedman excusing the bad reporting and splitting hairs in the face of strong evidence that the paper was wrong, evidence that at very least demanded a story of its own in the nation’s paper of record.

Now that Maddow has reported the news, perhaps Friedman will get the full correction he is owed, too late to save ACORN, which was illegally defunded by willfully ignorant members of Congress who literally commended the hackwork videos as investigative journalism in the public interest. The videos are more likely the product of criminal invasion of privacy, according to Attorney General Brown.

Strapped for cash and disgraced, ACORN shut its doors last week. As Friedman put it: “The anti-poverty organization of 400,000 low- and middle-income member families in 75 cities was successfully targeted and put out of business… by long, concerted smear campaigns intended to do little more than undercut ACORN’s successful voter registration drives… For enfranchising Americans to participate in their own democracy, the GOP had to put them out of business.”

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Rachel Maddow’s spot-on realtime response is rocketing around the Web — probably because it resonates with Republicans as much as it does with Democrats.

“Honestly… to invoke government failure during Katrina as a model for how to move forward as a country,” she said, aghast.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks delivered the same verdict but used more words:

“[T]o come up at this moment in history with a stale ‘government is the problem, we can’t trust the federal government,’ it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party… The country is in a panic now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill. But the idea that… government will have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to actually do stuff — to just ignore all that and just say ‘government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,’ it’s just a form of nihilism.”

Here in the Colorado, we got a double dose of Jindal-style political theater this week. In lieu of ideas, we got fire-and-brimstone quotes from scripture in the Legislature and “big government bad” recitations in a Senate Committee hearing. In both cases our elected officials were supposed to be working to solve quality-of-life problems that have persisted for decades. And in both cases the Republican proposal was to do nothing.

At the Senate Finance Committee hearing, citizen after citizen testified about how the provision to restrict the budget at the center of the debate had been devastating to many residents of the state. Statistic after statistic, study after study, bore them out. Colorado ranks at the bottom among the 50 states in providing child care, in spending on education and on infrastructure and health care. For a relatively wealthy state, the list is long and depressing. The Republicans were unmoved.

Which begs a question: Is this how conservative Republicans want our state (and nation) to look? After more than 15 years of TABOR-made small government, this is the result. Does it matter to the people still championing the philosophy that got us here?