DNC launches voting rights effort
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 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.
Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s bill to require proof of citizenship of all Colorado voters died Monday in a Senate committee–on a party-line vote. Proof the bill is needed just wasn’t there, Democrats said.
A bill designed by Secretary of State Scott Gessler and sponsored by Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, to ensure the integrity of the Colorado voting system is being called a means to reduce voter participation by voters’ rights advocates.
John McCain’s attempt to magnify allegations of voter registration fraud could mitigate the impact of a Barack Obama victory and deter black Democrats from turning out to vote in future elections.