Altogether, the Secretary of State’s office certified 83,696 signatures out of the 86,105 needed to place a measure on the ballot this year. Organizers have until Feb. 21 to come up with 2409 more valid signatures. They expressed confidence today that they could do that.

Campaign leader Mason Tvert issued this statement via email:

Today’s news is unexpected, but it is really just a very small bump in the road on our journey to end the irrational policy of marijuana prohibition in the state. Fortunately, we started this signature drive in 2011 so that we would have the opportunity to cure any shortfall in our count. We now have 15 days to collect approximately 3,000 valid signatures. Given that we were able to collect an average of 3,000 valid signatures per week during the first six months, we are confident we will complete this process successfully and qualify the initiative for the ballot. Then, in November, the people of Colorado will help us tax and regulate marijuana and end the insanity of punishing adults who make the rational choice to use a substance less harmful than alcohol.

Today’s announcement follows one made January 19 by the Secretary of State’s office that because a random sampling of signatures turned in by initiative supporters indicated that the total number of valid signatures would likely be within 10 percent of the total number needed, a line by line verification of signatures was required under state law.

This measure would allow adults to possess up to one ounce of marijuana. A second group is working on another initiative that would legalize marijuana without placing a limit on how much a person could have.

Image: Campaign supporter and attorney Brian Vicente speaks to the press the day the petitions were handed over to the Secretary of State. (Kersgaard)

In past years, biweekly reporting was required beginning in the July before the primary, with quarterly reporting required before that. Last year, though, the legislature voted to move primaries from August to May but did not change the reporting requirements, thus creating a situation where biweekly reporting would have to begin almost a year before the primary instead of a month prior. That prompted Secretary of State Scott Gessler to implement a rule that eliminated bi-weekly reporting altogether.

Since quarterly reports had been required in the off-years, the SOS office said under current law, candidates would have to file both quarterly and biweekly reports, which the office said was absurd.

At a hearing last summer then-Deputy Secretary of State William Hobbs agreed that it is up to the Legislature to change or clarify the requirements for this year. In the meantime, though, he said the SOS wanted the new rule be adopted on an emergency basis.

That rule, which was adopted by the Secretary of State’s office, eliminated biweekly filing altogether, with quarterly reports filed in the year prior to the election, and then monthly reports being filed during election years.

Attorney Mark Grueskin, representing Citizens for Integrity, said at the time that that would mean a candidate could receive huge amounts of money in the month prior to the primary without having to report it until after the election.

Those opposed to the emergency rule stressed that it was not the Secretary of State’s responsibility to enact rules based on the idea that the Legislature screwed up.

“There is an assumption that the Legislature acts deliberately,” Grueskin said. He said there should be the same assumption when the Legislature chooses not to act.

He said the Secretary of State does not have the luxury of deciding what the Legislature meant to do and then crafting a rule based on what might have been meant. Best to leave the law alone until the Legislature can make itself clear, as needed, in January, he said.

Today, that happened.

The Colorado House of Representatives today passed Senate Bill 12-014, which establishes that biweekly campaign finance reports will be filed for several weeks prior to the primary election. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins, and Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, and Reps. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, and Claire Levy, D-Boulder, synchronizes the statutory disclosure schedule with the new June primary date. The bill was signed by Gov. Hickenlooper today, the first bill signed this session.

Ethics Watch filed suit last year in Denver District Court challenging the rule on the grounds that the Secretary of State has no authority to override statutory disclosure requirements. The legislature’s Legal Services Committee voted 8-2 to reject the rule as exceeding the Secretary of State’s authority, leading Gessler to withdraw the rule on December 27. After the rule was withdrawn, Ethics Watch dismissed its lawsuit.

“We congratulate the legislature on its quick, bipartisan action to restore reasonable disclosure rules for the June primary,” said Luis Toro, director of Ethics Watch. “If Secretary of State Gessler had his way, voters would have been in the dark just as fundraising and spending pick up before the primary date. This is a victory for Coloradans from across the political spectrum who believe in the people’s right to know about money in elections.

“This shows there is bipartisan support in Colorado for transparency in campaign finances,” Toro added.

“Gessler said he was confident he could accomplish what he wanted to accomplish without legislation,” Katherine Vitale, an aide to House sponsor of the bill, Rep. Chris Holbert, told the Colorado Independent. “[Gessler] said there was no need for a bill.”

Vitale added that Holbert, a Republican from Parker, remains “tenaciously” committed to the issue.

Aides to the Senate sponsor of the bill, Highlands Ranch Republican Ted Harvey, told the Independent that reintroducing the bill is not among the senator’s immediate priorities this session.

Messages asking the secretary of state’s office to expand on Gessler’s plans were not returned.

House Bill 1252, Holbert and Harvey’s “Proof of Citizenship” legislation, mirrored a law that passed in Tennessee last year. Both bills came as part of a wave of Republican-sponsored election legislation introduced in capitols around the country.

The Colorado bill would have granted the secretary of state expansive power to throw registered voters off the rolls. Specifically, it would have required the secretary to “periodically check” voter registration records against a collection of databases “maintained by federal and state agencies.” If the secretary suspected that any registered voter “may not be a citizen,” he or she could initiate a 90-day process whereby the voter would have to prove again his or her right to vote.

For government watchdogs who have battled Gessler all year on issues from inactive voter ballots to campaign finance reporting thresholds and schedules, the news that he intends to address the “proof of citizenship” question through his office alone is as alarming as it is unsurprising.

“Last year, the secretary of state asked the legislature to change the law to give him authority to address this alleged problem,” Colorado Ethics Watch Director Luis Toro wrote in an email. “Nothing has changed since then, except that the secretary has apparently made the calculation that he won’t fare better with the legislature this year than he did last year. We appear headed for a repeat of the all-too-familiar pattern where Secretary Gessler simply does as he pleases, forcing someone to go to court for yet another ruling that the Secretary has overstepped his authority.”

Gessler, a high-profile Republican election and campaign finance law attorney, was a main driver behind the Proof of Citizenship bill. He testified on its behalf in Denver and on Capitol Hill, referring to a study conducted by his office that found more than 11,000 “individuals who (1) were non-citizens at the time they obtained a [Colorado] driver’s license, and (2) are registered to vote.”

Gessler was suggesting his office had uncovered a flaw in the state’s voter registration system that opened a door through which thousands of undocumented residents might land on the voter rolls and fraudulently cast ballots. It was a dramatic charge, although under scrutiny the numbers Gessler cited kept shifting, mostly downward. Thousands of illegally registered individuals became hundreds and then at last “106.” What’s more, Gessler was even less clear on whether or not even a single one of these 106 alleged illegally registered people had ever cast a vote.

Although county clerks, Democrat and Republican, pressed Gessler to reveal how and where they had failed to protect the state against fraud, they were never satisfied.

Gessler’s testimony in Denver and Washington and the study conducted by his office nevertheless garnered attention-getting headlines like the one run by Fox News pictured below, fueling doubts about the integrity of elections and playing into anti-Latino sentiment bolstering Tea Party legislative and election campaigns coast to coast.

Opponents of the Proof of Citizenship bill railed against it as flawed in its purpose and its design. They said there would be no real oversight on the secretary’s review of voter registration records and that, more significantly, the legislation proposed a solution to a problem that they believed Gessler had failed to persuade existed.

The fact that Gessler never produced substantial clear-cut evidence that the kind of voter fraud he was alleging had occurred bolstered the views of skeptical lawmakers that his claims did not justify putting in place a major new election law that could work to throw legitimate voters off the rolls, even if the new powers granted to the secretary’s office were not abused.

Asked by the Colorado Independent to examine the bill last year, Estelle Rogers, director of advocacy for Project Vote, said the bill should surely be rewritten or opposed.

“This does not appear to be a usual proof of citizenship bill,” she wrote in an email. “Instead it purports to allow ongoing questioning of one’s citizenship once a registrant is already on the rolls, setting up a class of voters who are, in effect, constantly ‘on probation’ because the secretary of state has ‘reason to believe’ they are not citizens.

“The secretary says he is ‘certain’ that 106 people on Colorado’s voter roll of 3.7 million are ‘improperly registered.’ That’s about 0.0028648648649 percent of the voter roll. Obviously such an error rate is to be expected whenever human beings are copying data from one list to another. Before the secretary of state jumps to the conclusion that these are 106 cases of voter fraud, he should have a lot more evidence than mere suspicion. Non-citizen voting is a fashionable political theme these days, but it has no basis in reality. And the right to vote is too important to confuse with sloganeering.”

Gessler recently announced he was seeking to loosen rules governing the use of electronic voting machines in the state, raising eyebrows again, given the dismal record of e-voting machine reliability over the last decade in the United States.

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According to state law, 86,105 valid signatures are required to place an initiative on the ballot this year. Also, according to statute, the Secretary of State’s office most conduct a line by line review of 5 percent of the signatures turned in, which was 8180 signatures. Having done that, if the random sample projects that the total number of valid signatures is between 90 percent and 110 percent of the number needed, then all signatures must by reviewed. Above or below those thresholds, the Secretary of State can project whether enough signatures were collected based on the sample.

In this case, just over 54 percent of the signatures in the random sample were judged to be valid, meaning that extrapolated out over the 163,598 signatures collected, it can be predicted that 88,719 valid signatures were collected, which is 103.4 percent of the number needed, which puts in the range that triggers an automatic line by line review.

Mason Tvert, one of the organizers of The measure to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol, says the need to validate each signature is no big deal.

“This is just part of the process,” he said. “We are confident that we collected more than enough valid signatures to make the ballot. This is why initiative campaigns collect so many more signatures than they need.”

The Secretary of State’s office has until February 3 to complete the review. Spokesperson Rich Coolidge said the office “will be cranking to get it done.”

He said that at the end of the review, if the number of signatures certified is below the number needed, organizers would have the chance to collect more. He said it is rare for the office to conduct a line by line review. More commonly, he said groups collect either enough to meet the 110 percent threshold or less than enough to trigger the review.

“These… rules you propose are designed to allow the cloak of secrecy to remain firmly in place, providing a major loophole which will allow corporations, unions, trade associations and other entities to escape reporting requirements,” Carroll wrote. “These [Colorado campaign finance] laws were passed by both chambers of the General Assembly and signed by the Governor. It is not the prerogative of the Secretary of State to negate these laws.”

The question of how money should be spent and tracked in politics is a top issue of debate across the country, a debate that has grown especially heated in the months since the U.S. Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision ruled that corporations and organizations can effectively spend without limit on election campaigns.

On an ideological level, the issue pits those who believe campaigns must be open about their financial backing so that voters know when special interests– whether oil companies or teachers unions– are seeking to promote candidates or causes versus those who believe spending is a form of expression and that disclosure laws run counter to constitutional free speech guarantees.

Colorado has passed relatively strict campaign finance laws, at the ballot box and at the capitol. The $200 issue committee donation reporting threshold Gessler is attempting to raise to $5000 with was set by voters in 2002 when they passed Amendment 27, and Senator Carroll, for example, sponsored last year’s SB 203, which aimed to firm up state disclosure laws in the wake of the Citizens United decision.

In addition to raising issue committee reporting thresholds, Gessler’s proposed rules would also limit fines on committees that violate disclosure rules, end all reporting on donations for months during the primary election season and loosen rules that separate issue committees, which take positions on matters such as abortion or clean water, from political committees, which promote candidates directly.

Not yet a year into his term, Gessler has proven a remarkably aggressive secretary of state, working at the edge of his authority to not just implement but to recast campaign finance and election law. He has said that the laws are a tangle and so need significant reworking through rulemaking in order to fend off lawsuits and to encourage public participation in politics.

Yet the changes he proposes draw howls and lawsuits from government watchdogs, who see them as inappropriately pushing along the same ideological lines Gessler argued for years as a high-profile conservative-politics attorney, when he represented clients in cases seeking to loosen donation disclosure rules.

Denver district judges have agreed with the watchdogs and have ruled against Gessler’s proposals in a series of trial contests, sometimes rebuking Gessler in harsh language for overreaching his authority.

“[Gessler is] deciding he’s going to amend the Constitution,” Denver District Court Judge Bruce Jones said last month in announcing he had decided against some of the rules being heard today. “I don’t even think I can do that, and I’m charged with a lot more authority to interpret and apply the constitution than is [Gessler].”

Jones ruled against Gessler’s attempt to raise donation threshold limits but Gessler has appealed that decision.

In her letter, Carroll references the judge’s remarks.

“The District Court has already admonished you for overstepping your authority, and yet again you are attempting to rewrite the law to benefit those who would distort the electoral process. Rather than follow the direction of the court, you now propose rules that conflict with the plain language of the statute, and reverse legislative intent. Rulemaking should not be an opportunity to overturn the law… I strongly urge you to limit the exercise of your rule-making process to comply with the Colorado Constitution and state statute.”

Carroll said she can’t attend the hearing at the secretary of state’s office Thursday but will be following developments closely.

The full text of her letter:

December 14, 2011


Dear Secretary Gessler:

As you may know I am the author and sponsor of key campaign-finance laws to assure that the citizens of Colorado know the source of funding for campaigns.

These laws provide minimal safeguards against moneyed interests hiding campaign contributions in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United allowing unfettered spending to influence elections.

Both chambers of the General Assembly passed these laws, and they were signed by the Governor of the state with the support of both Democrats and Republicans.

Now you want to overrule and negate this legislation. Your proposal is a major change to the existing law, one that is contrary to what voters adopted, and is in excess of what would be required to comply with any later decided cases.

Your rules and conditions to the existing definitions were never contemplated by the Legislature. As an example you add four conditions to the existing definition of “political organization.” See rule 7.2 and CRS section 1–45–103 (14.5).

These, and other rules you propose, are designed to allow the cloak of secrecy to remain firmly in place, providing a major loophole which will allow corporations, unions, trade associations and other entities to escape reporting requirements, even if they are engaged in express advocacy of candidates.

The District Court has already admonished you for overstepping your authority, and yet again you are attempting to rewrite the law to benefit those who would distort the electoral process. Rather than follow the direction of the court, you now propose rules that conflict with the plain language of the statute, and reverse legislative intent. Rulemaking should not be an opportunity to overturn the law.

I strongly urge you to limit the exercise of your rule-making process to comply with the Colorado Constitution and state statute.

Sincerely,
Senator Morgan Carroll
Aurora – Senate District 29

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Held Saturday, U.S. Human Rights Day, the event kicked off in Colorado a national effort to highlight and combat the voting rule changes. Speakers referenced recent watchdog reports (also see Brennan Center congressional testimony below) and drew historical parallels that set the new legislation into context with Jim Crow laws put into place in the defeated Confederate states after the Civil War by entrenched Democrats, so-called Dixiecrats, who sought to fight change by tamping down voting on the part of newly enfranchised black Americans.

“Voting is one of our most basic rights…. but today we are facing an assault on this right, the likes of which we haven’t seen in 100 years,” DeGette said. “The threat we’re talking about is striking on fronts all across the nation. Thirty-four states have introduced voter-suppression legislation. Bills have already passed in fourteen of those states and are pending in eight more. Some of the proposed laws end same-day voter registration and cut early voting opportunities in half. Reports have shown that these types of restrictions disproportionately affect African-American voters, blue-collar working citizens, young voters, seniors and parents that don’t have the flexibility in their schedules to stand in long lines at the polls on election day.

“It’s clear, sadly, that these efforts are being driven by a blatant desire for electoral gain by those who believe voters might stand in the way of their political ends.”

Supporters of the new voter rules say they’re necessary to prevent fraud and bolster confidence in the legitimacy of elections.

Detractors dismiss such claims, however, saying that fears of voter fraud have been wildly whipped up on the right precisely as a way to build support for laws designed to keep specific kinds of citizens from the polls, citizens who vote in large measures for Democratic candidates.

In the face of criticism, the Republican lawmakers and officials spearheading the rules changes have failed to produce evidence to demonstrate Americans perpetrate the kind of fraud that voter ID laws, for example, might combat.

Lightning strikes and UFOs

Adam Skaggs, an attorney with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, testified in 2009 for the Texas Senate on the merits of a proposed voter ID law. Over years of study, he told members of the chamber, it had become clear that the law they were considering would cause more problems than it would solve.

“Those who are screaming about fraud are crying wolf,” he said. “This is true of the most frequently reported forms of putative voter fraud—including double voting, voting in the name of dead people, and—most importantly for the purposes of this hearing—individuals impersonating registered voters at the polls.  The Brennan Center’s exhaustive research revealed that there is little to no reliable evidence of in-person impersonation fraud, in Texas, or elsewhere in the country.  And, of course, this form of fraud is the only misconduct that a voter identification requirement will address.

“This is worth repeating: the only problem that a voter ID requirement could possibly fix usually doesn’t exist.  Texans are struck and killed by lightning more often. And there are far, far more reports of UFOs every year than instances of impersonation at the polls.”

Speaking at Saturday’s event, Jenny Flanagan, director of voting and elections at Common Cause Colorado, said there were real problems with voting that the new laws would not only fail to address but would unquestionably exacerbate.

“There is no evidence of people misrepresenting themselves at the polls. There is plenty of evidence, however, that nearly half of Americans are not voting. Yet we are seeing two-thirds of our states introducing restrictive voter laws that will prevent eligible Americans from casting votes. That’s no accident.”

Flanagan pointed to the role played by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in shaping the new voter laws. Bankrolled by the billionaire oil magnate Koch brothers, ALEC delivers sample legislation to Republican lawmakers around the country designed to establish legal roots for contemporary conservative politics priorities. It has become clear that, for the Koch brothers and ALEC, tamping down participation among Democratic voter demographics vies, for example, with priorities such as thinning regulations on industry and lowering environmental standards.

In that context, Saturday’s speeches all eventually landed on controversial Republican Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler.

Gessler’s ‘austerity program for democracy’

“Things are tough for young Coloradans nowadays,” said Chris Getzan, a spokesman for youth-politics group New Era Colorado. “They’ve got crushing college debt. They don’t have much in the way of job options. But what we always tell them is that they still have a vote and they are able to organize.

“Scott Gessler’s plans? They result in an austerity program for democracy here in Colorado. They say that unless your last name is ‘incorporated,’ there’s a little less democracy to go around. If you want to see where the enthusiasm gap begins, look no further than Scott Gessler’s office.”

Gessler has made national news and rates special mention in Brennan Center reports this year for seeking through legislation and rulemaking to raise roadblocks to voting in the name of preventing fraud.

During the 2011 legislative session, Gessler pushed hard at the capitol for House Bill 1252, introduced by Republican lawmakers Chris Holbert and Ted Harvey. The bill sought to give Gessler expansive powers to throw registered voters off the rolls. The law would have required Gessler to “periodically check” voter rolls against a vague collection of databases “maintained by federal and state agencies.” If the secretary suspected that any registered voter “may not be a citizen,” he could initiate a 90-day process whereby the voter would have to prove again his or her right to vote.

Gessler argued that he had found cases of voter fraud in which non-citizens had cast ballots in Colorado in the 2010 election. He testified in Colorado and on Capitol Hill that, based on a cross-check of vague databases, his office had uncovered thousands of likely fraudulent votes. He started by suggesting 11,000 fraudulent votes had been cast, a shocking number that under scrutiny later shrank to 5,000 and then to hundreds. Gessler finally said he was almost sure that 106 illegal immigrants had voted in the state, an assertion that nevertheless drew strong pushback from county clerks, Republican and Democrat.

Gessler never produced substantial evidence of the kind of voter fraud he was alleging and that was supposed to justify putting in place major new election laws in the state.

House Bill 1252 seemed to come out of nowhere, with its alarming reference to illegal immigrant voting and reliance on hazy security “databases,” which the secretary of state would be empowered to monitor. In fact, it was a Colorado version of a bill and amendment introduced and passed this year in Tennessee.

Tennessee’s Senate Bill 352 was introduced by Republican Mark Norris and amended by Republican Ken Yager.

The legislation failed to pass in Colorado where Democrats, despite the GOP wave election of 2010, continued to control the state Senate and the governor’s office.

Colorado’s 1252

TN Yager amendment

Once the legislative session eneded, however, Gessler drew heat for attempting but failing to prevent county clerks from mailing out ballots to inactive voters, or voters who failed to vote in 2010. He is now drawing scrutiny for seeking to loosen rules governing the use of electronic voting machines in the state.

Nothing new

Marcus Farmer, president of the Denver Chapter of the NAACP, characterized push back against the new voter laws as part of a long battle.

The NAACP was formed in reaction to 19th century voter-suppression efforts, he said. “What we’re seeing today is not new.”

“The fact is, these requirements serve to disproportionately affect communities of color. African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, students, working women, senior citizens, and immigrants in ways that have not been seen since the era following reconstruction… About 25 percent or 6.2 million African-American voters and 16 percent of Latino-American voters or 3 million people don’t possess the types of IDs being required in these states,” he said.

Minister Dawn Riley Duval with Denver’s Metro Organizations for People, put a positive spin on the new laws. She said the hurdles they erect to voting will serve to energize presidential election year get out the vote efforts.

“Why are we here today?” she asked. “We’re here to call out real voter fraud, which is when people use dishonest claims to make it harder for citizens to exercise our fundamental right to vote…

“We’re also here to serve notice. We’re here to let folks know we’re going to rock the get out the vote efforts like never seen before. Because, by trying to jack our votes, they reignited the fire in our bellies…. We’re more determined than ever to get voters registered and get voters to the polls, even if that means putting voters on our backs to get them there.

“They will not steal the youth vote. They will not disenfranchise Hispanic voters and African-American voters. They will not suppress senior citizens’ votes. They will not do it. They will not do it. They will not do it, not on our watch. They will not do it and that’s why we’re here today.”

Norden Testimony

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Joe Perez, a retired city worker, is the owner of this gathering space, a clapboard nerve center of northern Colorado Obama politics tucked into a cul-de-sac between a maze of wooden fences. The interior is plastered with political signs in English and Spanish. One stretches across the entire back wall: “The road to the presidency goes through Greeley” it announces in big-brush block letters. The volunteers point out the sign and laugh at its ironic grandiosity but they also semi-seriously embrace it.

They’ll tell you that Colorado is a pivotal swing state and that it reflects key demographic and economic changes taking place throughout the American west. Although the Northern Colorado Tea Party, for example, is one of the largest Tea Party groups in the country and held repeat candidate forums in the Greeley area during the 2010 election season, its familiar rallying cries– like “We want our country back”– either fail to resonate with or offend the kind of people who are destined to eventually dominate the region. Over the last decades, large numbers of coastal and university-town Americans have come here to work in expanding tech and research industries and, together with the growing mostly still working-class Latino population, are tipping the state’s formerly red-libertarian political profile to a shade of purple that places public good at least on something like par with individual liberty as a top government priority.

In fact, at a glance, the volunteers in Joe’s garage could be northern Colorado Tea Partiers. These aren’t stereotypical fresh-faced Obamatron hipsters; these are politicized older people. Outwardly, the two most glaring differences between these volunteers and local Tea Partiers are that they are an ethnically mixed bunch and that they are intensely organized on election campaign work. They are not discussing the news or politics or the failings of the media– or anything else. They’re on task. It’s nearly a year from Election Day and a holiday week and yet there’s almost no time being wasted in this garage.

Material from the national organization, Obama for America (OFA), spreads out on long foldout tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Laptops are open with browsers showing the My Barack Obama or My-BO and Democratic Party VoteBuilder databases. People are typing from the beginning to the end of the meeting. Everyone knows what they’re here to do.

As the meeting progresses, Perez fills out a big white-board calendar set in front of the car door.

A woman named Trish updates a list of thousands of Weld County residents’ names with answers to a host of ground-game questions: Who seemed receptive to the message? Who wants to volunteer? Who changed a phone number? Who needs to register to vote?

Pat Bruner, the meeting facilitator, works off an agenda cheat-sheet provided by the national campaign, ticking off items and adding notes for next week.

Dates are being set for face-to-face coffees with potential volunteers. Follow-up pre-printed OFA postcards are being addressed to be mailed out the week after Thanksgiving. Phone banking time is scheduled to talk to the voters receiving the postcards. There is a Review and Preview meeting set for the middle of December, where the group will look back on progress made and ahead to goals that must be achieved in the first weeks of the new year.

Ten minutes after the meeting starts, the volunteers are all on their phones, looking mainly at this stage to line up more organizers and swell the ranks of the northern Colorado advance teams. Those not typing notes are scribbling away with OFA pens.

The Greeley team has been meeting here to work exclusively on the campaign since August. Nearly all of them worked to elect Obama in 2008 and most have been working to gain public support for Obama’s policy agenda since he was inaugurated. To do that, they have essentially been using the same organizing techniques and as a bonus keeping the campaign’s network of contacts fresh.

Dissipated electricity

Perez’s story of how he recently became involved in Democratic politics is typical of the genre. He moved to Greeley from Denver 30 years ago looking for a smaller, agricultural, more culturally conservative community, something more like western Nebraska where he grew up. Greeley suits him but there were drawbacks.

“It’s so [politically] conservative up here, I felt I couldn’t really speak my convictions,” he said. “I was never political. After Vietnam, I put a McGovern sticker on my car. That was my first political action outside the voting booth. Then I saw Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. He told his story. He said ‘We’re not African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. We’re all just Americans.’

“Well, I’ve been called a wetback, a beaner, a spic,” Perez said, counting off the names on his fingers. “I’ve been called everything, but never an American. That’s all I ever wanted to be, an American. Obama electrified me about the inclusiveness of the American people.”

That variety of Obama electricity has diminished now that he is also familiar to Americans as the captain of a dysfunctional Washington at a time of crisis. For the 99 percent, the national economy three years after Obama took office is still limping along, throwing up the kind of high unemployment figures it’s easy to imagine would dance like hooded reapers through the dreams of any sitting president. In response, the campaign is looking in part to provide context for voters through messaging that focuses on the alternative realities any of the likely Republican candidates would have brought about.

Perez says one of the main hurdles he’s coming up against in talking to voters is disillusionment, where citizens who cast their first-ever ballot did so for Obama last election and have come to believe it didn’t make any difference. Washington is still Washington: the games go on as usual there while the vast majority of Americans continue to suffer coast to coast.

For these dispirited voters, Perez delivers a list of examples of Republican actions taken over the past three years that he believes demonstrates a cynical obstructionist approach to government. He leads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement from January 2009 in which he held that the “single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Perez mentions the debt and budget standoffs this year that saw Republicans bringing the nation to the “brink of disaster” by refusing to consider raising taxes even on millionaires when debt default loomed and Standard and Poor’s delivered an historic downgrading of the nation’s credit rating. Same thing, says Perez, when you look at what just happened with the congressional super committee, which was formed out of desperation to negotiate a compromise budget but failed to do so.

“There’s a vision of an America that guards the living wage, the opportunity of education, that looks after the well-being of its citizens,” Perez said. “That’s Obama’s vision. I share that vision and I think most Americans share that vision, but there’s just a lack of cooperation to get things done.

“The other side doesn’t seem to care about what they call the ‘bottom feeders,’ [people] who should all just take a shower and get a job. The American people want to work, they want to keep their homes. Unemployment benefits put food on the table but they don’t pay rent. People want jobs. These are our family members and friends. They’re Americans.”

As Jim Rutenberg, writing on the campaign message for the New York Times last weekend, put it: “If 2008 was about ‘Yes We Can’ and limitless possibility, 2012 will be to some degree about why we couldn’t (‘Republican intransigence’), and why we shouldn’t, at least when it comes to anything the Republican nominee proposes (‘His party got us here in the first place’).”

Message and mechanics

For now, however, the message seems less important than the mechanics, and on that score the campaign is notching major successes.

By mid-October, the donor-ticker at the Obama for America website rolled past seven digits. More than a million people have given to the campaign, a rate of giving that outpaces the record set by the first Obama presidential campaign. In the third quarter, the re-election effort raked in $42 million and received 257,000 first-time donations. The average amount donated was $55.

By mid-November, the campaign celebrated its millionth one-on-one conversation with voters, a mark of the old-school approach to election politics taken by the Obama team that prioritizes the ground game and an achievement that buoys campaign staffers despite the lousy economy and shifting poll numbers.

“Our opponents… simply lack the broad base of grassroots support that we have,” campaign manager Jim Messina said at the time. “They don’t believe in it. They don’t have any interest in the kind of politics that bring everyday people together to make real change in this country.”

According to a November campaign memo, the national team also confirmed it had signed on its thousandth volunteer neighborhood team leader. The author of the memo announced successes around the country that included a “day of action” in Colorado that drew 537 volunteers who worked from 58 “staging locations” to arrange more than 100 one-on-one meetings with Obama supporters and independent voters.

Obama for America presently has two offices open in Colorado, one in Denver and one in Fort Collins, and is hiring staff to cover the entire state. Two priorities that have taken shape in the state, according to the Greeley volunteers and campaign officials, is to protect voting rights and to reach out to women. Neither priority comes as a surprise.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has made national news for seeking the authority to purge the state’s election rolls of voters he believes may be illegally registered non-citizens or illegal immigrants and for acting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to “inactive voters” or legally registered voters who failed to vote in the 2010 election. He has met stiff resistance in these efforts but Democratic sources routinely refer to him as the state’s Katherine Harris, the controversial Republican Florida secretary of state in 2000 who declared that George Bush had defeated Al Gore and who halted recount efforts despite the fact that a margin of only roughly 500 votes separated the candidates and that widespread allegations of irregularities plagued the ballot casting and counting processes.

In 2010, by almost all accounts, women decided the Colorado U.S. Senate race that pitted Democrat Michael Bennet against Republican Ken Buck. Perez said the Greeley Obama volunteers worked on that race intensely, a race Buck seemed poised to run away with. In the end, however, he turned off women in droves with his strong stand against abortion and his mishandling as Weld County District Attorney of a rape case in which he appeared to blame the victim, arguing that the assault charges weren’t worth pursuing and doing so in crude language that betrayed a retrograde view of sex crimes and gender relations in general.

The Greeley volunteer meeting facilitator on Monday, Pat Bruner, a multi-ethnic mainly German-Japanese mom– “a typical Heinz 57 American,” as she puts it– grew up in Fort Collins and worked for the Obama campaign in 2008. She said she has a big family and feels the need to work to put in place a government that embraces the future, that isn’t mired in the battles of the past. She said many of the voters she is meeting with share similar concerns.

“We spend a lot of time just sitting down with people, talking. They’re worried but they’re also very open and positive about the message. We [volunteers] just keep our eye down the road. We know what part we play in the bigger picture. It’s person to person, phone call after phone call. It’s not glamorous. It’s hard work.”

[Image: Obama presides in Joe Perez's garage in Greeley.]

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Brewer, acting in response to Tea Party agitation and on behalf of Republican lawmakers dissatisfied with the redistricting plan drawn up by the commission, removed Matthis, claiming she had demonstrated “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”

Twenty-one Senate Republicans backed Brewer to provide the two-thirds senate vote she needed to remake the five-member commission, which was created by voters to take the highly partisan, once-a-decade work of redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers. The commission consists of two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent. Matthis is the independent. According to the Arizona Republic, Brewer had targeted the two Democrats as well but could not secure the votes to remove them.

Similar wrangling in states over redistricting and voting laws has been a top political story this year.

After the midterm elections of 2010 swept Republican majorities into state houses across the country, decades of legislation meant to expand the franchise by flattening barriers to participation in elections ground to a halt. Laws raising hurdles to voter registration and ballot casting cropped up in states across the country, pushed by Republicans arguing the need to protect against voter fraud. The roughly 20 laws passed in state capitols this year would make it more difficult for more than 5 million eligible citizens to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

In Colorado, the election of 2010 delivered a split legislature, with Democrats running the Senate and Republicans running the House. To almost no one’s surprise, legislative redistricting efforts broke down among partisan bickering during last spring’s session. Republicans are now appealing a congressional redistricting map presented by a court. A judge also recently turned back as unacceptable state district reapportionment maps.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a longtime Republican partisan campaign finance and election law attorney who won office last year, has made national news by seeking the power to throw suspected undocumented citizens off the voter rolls and for attempting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to legally registered inactive voters.

He cited the need to combat fraud in both cases without ever presenting credible evidence that there was any fraud occurring in the state.

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“[Gessler is] deciding he’s going to amend the Constitution. I don’t even think I can do that, and I’m charged with a lot more authority to interpret and apply the constitution than is [Gessler],” Jones said from the bench, according to the Denver Post.

The suit pits the secretary of state’s office against good government nonprofits Colorado Ethics Watch and Common Cause.

Gessler, a longtime opponent of strict campaign finance disclosure rules in his career as a private-practice attorney, sought through a rulemaking to raise issue committee donation reporting thresholds set by voters in 2002 when they passed Amendment 27.

In November of last year, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Sampson v Buescher decided that the burden of the state’s reporting requirement was too high as it pertained to an issue committee organized around a municipal election. Gessler’s new reporting rule came in response to that decision. It attempted to shift the registration and reporting threshold for issue committees from $200 to $5000. The rule also would have eliminated the requirement to disclose any information about the first $5,000 of issue committee contributions and expenditures.

Ethics Watch and Common Cause asked the court to throw out Gessler’s “breathtaking” rule, as it would effectively destroy issue committees as a category in the state against the will of the people.

Judge Jones did not rule on the case Tuesday but said he would deliver a decision in the case by Thanksgiving.

“It’s breathtaking,” Ethics Watch Director Luis Toro told the Colorado Independent in September. “As a representative of the state, [Gessler] would normally be the defendant in such a case… But he’s effectively asking two private organizations to defend the Colorado Constitution from his complaint. How can he sue two organizations that don’t represent the state?

“Gessler would normally be expected to defend the laws defining issue committees… It’s a legal obligation. He has no authority to file a suit against them.”

Toro said that, as secretary of state, Gessler had to put aside his view of campaign finance law as posing hurdles to public participation and threats to free speech– or at least put it into a context in which he was still able to defend the law as it appears on the books.

Judge Jones echoed that sentiment Tuesday, telling Gessler attorneys that “the side [they] should be on is defending the constitution.”

Secretary of state spokesperson Rich Coolidge told the Post that Gessler was acting to defend the state against lawsuits. He said the Sampson case, for example, cost the state more than $600,000.

Last month another district judge, Brian Whitney, ruled against Gessler in a high-profile election-law case. Gessler sought an injunction against Denver county– and by extension all counties in Colorado– to stop Clerk Debra Johnson from sending ballots to legally registered voters who failed to cast votes in the 2010 general election. A final ruling on the new interpretation of state election law Gessler proposed in that case is likely to come in the spring. Critics saw Gessler’s rule on ballots and his lawsuit against Denver as attempted vote suppression, along the lines of similar efforts waged by Republican officeholders in states across the nation in advance of the 2012 presidential election.

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“If these people thought this was a conservative country, they would want to put voting booths in every Wal Mart,” he said. “They would want more people to vote.”

Further, he said you can tell it is a liberal country because Rush Limbaugh and most of the talking heads at Fox are angry. If this was a conservative country, he said, they would host nice, happy shows. “They know the country has left them behind,” he said.

As evidence of the country’s liberalness, he said a majority of Americans think same-sex marriage should be legal, 72 percent want taxes on the wealthiest Americans raised, and 60 percent want the war in Afghanistan to end now.