Tag: Election Protection

Journalist Greg Palast — famous for uncovering disenfranchisement of black voters during the 2000 Florida election while working for the BBC — has just finished a cross-country tour investigating allegations of voter fraud in numerous battleground states, and says that Colorado could be the scene of wide-spread election problems.

Clerks in several of Colorado's closely watched swing counties are continuing to sound the alert: Would-be voters this year should not expect to just slip in and out of the polls on Election Day, thanks to expected record turnouts — and an extraordinarily long Colorado ballot, the longest in 96 years and the longest of any in the country.

In a hastily arranged news conference, Secretary of State Mike Coffman released figures on "cancelled voters" that directly contradict a 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 New York Times reports that tens of thousands of eligible voters have been illegally removed from the rolls in Colorado and five other swing states. And what does Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman have to say? Nothing. Oh wait! Nothing to say, that is, until the story comes out.

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.

Need some cash come Election Day? The Denver Elections Commission is paying up to $15 an hour for poll workers to staff voting locations around the city.

Colorado's confusing voter registration form has prompted county clerks to reject at least 4,800 new voter applications. And while election officials say there's still time for the applicants to get onto voter rolls, watchdog groups warn of unintended disenfranchisement.

First there was Florida. Then there was Ohio. Will Colorado be next? The state’s got a brand new voter database system, the longest ballot in the nation, and hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations to contend with, all of which raise the specter of chaos at the polls come November. And while elections officials maintain that Colorado can pull off its elections without a hitch, several voter watchdog groups say otherwise.

Google, the ubiquitous source for all knowledge online, has launched a series of new geeky tools to assist voters in locating their polling places, check their registration and a host of other tidbits to promote as smooth a voting experience as possible on Nov. 4 notwithstanding our own home grown problems.