Tag: Common Cause

It is a bill good-government activists were supposed to get behind enthusiastically. Then they read it. Now they now decry it as being ambiguously worded and ripe for abuse.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler told the Arapahoe County Republican Men’s Club recently that his office has removed more than 400 noncitizen residents of Colorado from the voter rolls, according to the Colorado Statesman.

State Senator Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, a strong advocate for campaign-finance transparency, Wednesday penned an open letter to Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, asking him to rethink rules he is proposing that would dramatically thin laws governing political issue committee donation disclosure reporting (pdf). Gessler's office is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the proposed rules today.

DENVER-- Colorado Democratic Congresswoman Diana DeGette and representatives of the state's top civil rights organizations this weekend railed against efforts by Republican lawmakers and officials around the country to recast voter rules. Flooded with pale mountain sun on the west steps of the capitol, the speakers took turns detailing ways new registration and voting requirements and restrictions will make it more difficult for millions of Americans to cast ballots in presidential election year 2012.

In his more than 20-year political career, Colorado 6th District Republican Congressman Mike Cofffman has never lost an election. Before heading to Capitol Hill, he was a state representative and senator, then state treasurer and then briefly secretary of state. Among insiders, it has been accepted as a given that Coffman is planning to take a run in 2014 at Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Udall's seat. Any future Coffman political plans, however, were complicated Thursday, when Denver District Judge Robert Hyatt put the 6th District GOP stronghold into play by paring off large swaths of mostly white suburbs south of Denver and including more urban, working-class and Latino regions to the north.

Government watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch has been engaged in a legal back and forth with Secretary of State Scott Gessler over a campaign finance rule adopted by Secretary of State last spring. In a brief filed with a Denver District court Wednesday, Ethics Watch argues Gessler is rewriting the law instead of merely setting forth rules directing citizens on how to abide it, and, in a counter claim, Gessler is asking the court to effectively throw out a constitutional provision he has sworn he would defend as an elected official.

Colorado Common Cause will hold a rally Sunday in Avon to protest a Vail Valley retreat this weekend set up by conservative political donors Charles and David Koch.

Word that a retreat hosted by conservative mega-donors Charles and David Koch is coming to Colorado, has spurred activists across the state into action. Colorado Common Cause, Progress Now, Moveon.org, and others plan to meet and protest in Beaver Creek, Sunday morning.

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 report authored by election watchdog organizations Common Cause and Demos points to a series of unaddressed problems likely to suppress the vote in...