Tag: El Paso County

The El Paso County Clerk's office has confirmed that it forwarded a complaint to investigative authorities that alleges former staffer Alissa Vander Veen committed voter fraud in the state senate recall election the county held this summer.

DENVER -- El Paso County Clerk Wayne Williams sent out for investigation the names of 18 voters suspected of committing fraud in the election to recall state Sen. John Morse. One of them may have belonged to his former chief deputy and spokesperson.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar visited his native state Monday where he declared there will be “better days ahead” but, he also warned, Colorado and the nation have not seen the end of fire season.

In the last 24 hours, Coloradans have gained a more clear picture of the kind of aid the Obama administration and federal authorities will offer to help address the wildfires raging in the state and aid displaced residents.

COLORADO SPRINGS-- The Democratic primary debate here Friday pitting U.S. Senate candidate and former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff against Sen. Michael Bennet was an odd tug of war. Romanoff argued that there were significant differences between the two candidates but Bennet argued that those differences were "vanishingly small" and suggested Romanoff was stooping to petty attacks to gain traction.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has raised tens of thousands of dollars more than his Republican counterpart, John McCain, in the heavily Republican Colorado Springs region, according to an analysis of campaign finance records by The Gazette. Even though the area boasts twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats, Obama raised $265,920 vs. McCain's $202,626 from the start of the campaign through August.

Hundreds of thousands of Colorado voters are sending their mail-in ballots back to county clerks this week, and among them are several dozen jail inmates who successfully registered to vote this year. The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition recently launched a vigorous vote-from-jail campaign. And while some counties have been more receptive than others, in Denver alone the number of voting inmates quadrupled from 20 people in 2004 to 80 this year.

An ominous-sounding letter that El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink sent to a journalism student at Colorado College has reignited a three-week old controversy over his past erroneous assertion that out-of-state college students are not eligible to vote in Colorado.

Amid growing concerns of voter suppression in El Paso County, Ralph Routon, the editor of the Colorado Springs Independent altweekly newspaper, has published an open letter to Gov. Bill Ritter “strongly encouraging him to step in and do something about Colorado's worsening election crisis.”

El Paso County is Colorado’s most-populated county. It’s also, undeniably, a GOP stronghold with a rich legacy of political hijinks and shenanigans — usually inspired by Republicans. And that leaves plenty of progressives leery that, come Election Day, Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink will do everything he can to make it difficult, or at least unpleasant, for non-Republicans to vote. Which leads us to Democrat state Sen. John Morse's claims of Balink's 12-point strategy to suppress the vote.