Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Purge in Colorado

Update: Voter protection groups suing the Colorado Secretary of State for purging voters from registration rolls reached an agreement late Wednesday just prior to ruling from the bench on a preliminary injunction. Under the agreement voters purged since May 14th will vote on provisional ballots with their votes receiving priority scrutiny to insure valid votes are counted. If they are on a list of purged voters generated by the state after the election, their provisional ballots will be presumed to be valid and counted. The secretary of state's office must also conduct an independent review of each ballot rejected by a county clerk. The state will order the clerk to count the vote if it was improperly rejected prior to the state's certification of the Colorado vote. This last minute bureaucratic patch simply adds to the burden faced by officials trying to cope with what appears to be a record voter turnout all over the country. But the temporary fix is better than not having the votes counted at all since the federal district judge hearing the injunction request indicated he was concerned with the logistical impact of reinstating so many voters so near election day. What is lacking are uniform standards for states to follow when they legitimately purge their election rolls of ineligible voters. In Michigan, a federal appeals court in Detroit delivered a similar victory on Thursday for about 5,500 voters who had been dropped from the rolls. The 2-to-1 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said state elections officials should not remove registered voters from the rolls, even if their voter ID cards had been returned as undeliverable.

AP and the New York Times are reporting that county clerks in two of Colorado's most populous counties have purged thousands of voters from their registration roles for failing to check a box on their registration forms indicating they do not have a Colorado driver's license. That's right America, these people are being denied their right to vote for not having a driver's license even if they may be legal residents of the state. Activist groups including Common Cause have gone to court to stop the clerks from illegally removing any more voters from the rolls. An estimated 26,931 voters were removed on orders from State Secretary Mike Coffman(R). Federal law (National Voter Registration Act of 1993) says that voters can't be removed from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election unless they have died, been convicted of a felony or requested that they be removed. The watchdog groups allege these voters weren't removed for any of these reasons. Greg Palast, a BBC journalist who wrote an article in the Rolling Stone about Republican efforts to block the vote, says Colorado is the most problematic example of systematic voter disenfranchisement in the nation. "In Colorado," he says, "you've got two-fisted thievery by the Republican Party and two hands over the eyeballs by the Democratic Party." The free publicity Coffman is getting should help him in race for Congress to replace right wingnut Tom Tancredo of the uber-conservative 5th District. Wackydoodle sez: If'in they want to burn books too, I'm a willin' to help!