Voter-fraud hawk Scott Gessler, the secretary of state who has spent years looking (fruitlessly) under every Colorado rock for a fraudulent voter, has finally found one.
But he thinks this fraudulent voter is, well, great. The man who wants to be your law-and-order governor doesn’t want to see the fraud locked up. He wants to pat him on the back.
Seriously. It makes you wonder who the fraud is.
When I went to Gessler’s gubernatorial announcement Tuesday night, I asked him about the voting stunt that prankster Jon Caldara, the unserious president of a think tank, pulled off — taking a phony residence in El Paso County (where he said he was renting an apartment from a state representative) and winkingly announcing his intention to move from Boulder to live in Colorado Springs.
He did all this in order to qualify to vote in the recall of Senate president John Morse. He did vote, in a protest of a new Colorado voter law making it easier for people to register and (legally) vote. He showed the attending media that he was turning in a blank ballot. But whether he was qualified — as an El Paso resident — is another matter altogether. And now the attorney general’s office is investigating whether what looks and feels like a prankster’s version of voter fraud is, in fact, voter fraud.
Gessler, who is Colorado’s top elections official and who was, in a previous life, an election lawyer, said he was not offended by Caldara’s stunt. He was all in.
“I think Caldara did a really good job of bringing attention to this,” he said. “I think he really did.
“I think he handled it in the right way in the sense of not casting a vote. I mean, he cast a ballot, but it was blank, so nobody could accuse him of doing something wrong. And it sounds like he’s staying in El Paso.”
Caldara is not staying in El Paso, of course. He never intended to stay. He announced just days later that, given the flood in Boulder, he thought it might not be a good idea to be separated from his kids, who didn’t make the move. (Ha. Ha. A good joke about the flood.)
When I informed Gessler that the El Paso voter had already moved back to Boulder, he said he hadn’t paid attention to the case of late. Of course, he’s busy running for governor. And he wants you to know that the man who wants to be your governor wants voters just like Caldara.
“I guess I agree with him,” Gessler said of Caldara. “I mean, people should live in the district before they vote in the district. And It seems as though our law doesn’t allow that, which I think is absurd.”
Definitely, something is absurd here. We’ll let the voters decide what, or who, it is.
I lived in Caldara’s neighborhood when he was on the RTD board and the only thing I remember him doing at all besides being witty was getting the 205 bus re-routed from the 500 block of University where he lived.