In a hastily arranged news conference, Secretary of State Mike Coffman released figures on “canceled voters” that directly contradict an Oct. 9 front page investigative report published in the New York Times on massive and possibly illegal purges of registered voters from state voter rolls.
The Times article cited data, which was reviewed by two independent voting experts, that pointed to an astounding 37,000 voters statewide being pulled from the rolls in the three weeks leading up to Aug. 12 primary election. Coffman disputes that figure and puts the more delicately phrased “canceled voters” at 14,049. The secretary admitted, however, that nearly 2,500 of those voters may have been illegally removed because they were purged after the legal deadline.
The National Voter Registration Act specifies that systematic deletions of voters from the rolls may not occur 90 days before the Nov. 4 general election.
The State Department argues that their system of manually picking out ineligible voters — rather than a faceless computer-automated process — does not violate the law. Colorado Attorney General John Suthers has been asked to rule on Coffman’s interpretation of the NVRA. Meanwhile, the 2,454 voters who were flagged because of possible duplicate records in the new centralized voter registration database, known as SCORE, sit in limbo 10 days prior to the start of early voting and as absentee ballots arrive in voters’ mail.
The State Department released a detailed list of “canceled voters,” which interestingly undermines previous hair-on-fire warnings by Coffman, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink and GOP operatives on the scourge of fraudulent voter registration forms and non-citizens attempting to cast ballots:
Stay tuned to The Colorado Independent for updates on this developing story.
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