In the last two years, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has made voter fraud prevention a top priority. His efforts have included working to stop county clerks from sending absentee ballots to inactive voters, lobbying for a controversial voter ID law and leading an unprecedented effort to determine whether non-citizens are voting in the state.
Ruthelle Frank, an 84-year-old resident of a small town in Wisconsin, is suing her home state because, for the first time in her adult life, she might not be able to vote. In 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature enacted a new law that requires state-issued photo identification for all voters. Because Frank cannot drive, she has never held a license. Last November, Frank’s daughter drove her to their local Department of Motor Vehicles office to obtain a photo ID.
DENVER– Republicans and Democrats skirmished Wednesday over voter ID requirements, taking up a battle waging in capitols around the country and rehashing arguments that have been set against each other here every year for nearly a decade. The bill, HB 1111, passed in a party line vote in the Republican-controlled House State Affairs committee but is sure to be killed later on a party-line vote in a Democrat-controlled Senate committee.
The Democratic National Committee launched an online campaign last week to educate voters about what the group calls efforts that aim “to restrict voting purely for partisan gain.”
The League of Women Voters has released a breakdown of what the group calls “myths” about voter fraud that have circulated in state legislatures in the past year.
The latest dispatch from the frontlines of the voter wars crisscrossing the country this year comes from Phoenix. The Arizona supreme court ruled that political lightning-rod Governor Jan Brewer failed to justify ousting Colleen Mathis as chair of the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission. The court reinstated Matthis.
Richard Allen Smith, Afghan war veteran and vice chairman of national soldier and veteran advocacy organization VoteVets, on Thursday hand delivered a petition with more than 9,000 signatures asking Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler to drop the lawsuit he filed seeking to prevent counties in the state from mailing ballots to inactive voters, including to soldiers serving away from home. The organization is asking Gessler to accept a decision handed down in district court last week finding insupportable Gessler’s interpretation of election law in the matter.
Pueblo County Clerk Gilbert Ortiz gave Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler until this morning to specifically and formally address another of the charged ramifications of his new interpretation of state election law. Gessler got in under the wire. Thursday evening, he sent Ortiz a letter ordering him not to send ballots to any of the county’s “inactive voters”– legally registered voters who failed to cast ballots in the previous even-year general election– including roughly 70 soldiers on the Pueblo County inactive voter rolls serving out of state. In Pueblo as elsewhere in the state, inactive voters are now meant to visit the clerk’s office or a polling place to retrieve ballots. With the election a month away, Gessler’s directive seems likely to effectively disenfranchise the soldiers.
In filing suit yesterday against Denver County over its 2011 election plan, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has raised the specter for the second time since he took office in January that he is using his position as head of elections not to expand but to suppress voting in the state.
Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet today requested that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) carefully review highly restrictive photo identification voter requirements that are under consideration or recently signed into law in several states. He said such laws could potentially disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters.
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