Tag: Elena Nunez

Updated to add statement from Rep. Leslie Herod of Denver. As a powerful organization backed by some of the nation's wealthiest conservative families prepares to...

This week, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams finally roared. What set him off? Not claims of a rigged election. Not the signatures of dead...

Over the course of a five-hour rulemaking hearing Monday, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler probably got the message that a lot of people are unhappy with proposed rules that would stop county clerks from mailing ballots to inactive voters in some elections, change the way canvass boards are selected and give county clerks more power to determine how much access election watchers have.

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Newly released documents confirm that politicians and industry representatives secretly met in March to hammer out a position on the Bureau of Land Management's plan to scale back available lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for oil shale research and development.

Denver District Court Judge Bruce Jones ruled Thursday (pdf) that Secretary of State Scott Gessler overreached last summer when, through rulemaking, he raised constitutionally established donation disclosure limits for issue committees in the state. Judge Jones signaled during arguments that he believed Gessler had taken it onto himself to amend the Colorado Constitution, an absurd stretch for a non-lawmaking official such as the secretary of state. Gessler said he is determined to appeal the decision. He dismissed Jones's arguments as mere grandstanding for the press.

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.

Voting rights experts upbraided Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman today for shirking federal law by rejecting as many as 10,000 new voter applications. In a letter to Coffman, representatives of eight organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, Colorado Common Cause and the Fair Elections Legal Network in Washington, D.C., demanded that the Secretary of State’s office direct county clerks to accept applications with minor omissions or technical mistakes.