President (To Win Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
May 04, 2007 06:03 PM UTC
24 Comments
Not surprisingly, Mr. Kopelman moved quickly to hide his website. For now, you can view yesterday’s version from web.archive.org.
Before:
http://web.archive.o…
or
http://web.archive.o…
Here’s a picture of Mr. Kopelman with our friend Ann Coulter:
How old is this shot? Any where it was taken?
Have Holtzy’s photoshop people been working overtime? Ann Coulter looks like friggin’ Britney Spears !
She’s wearing a turtleneck so you can’t see her adam’s apple.
And it’s a waist-up shot so you can’t see the bulge in her pants.
Whew! Thanks for setting me straight !
I have genuine respect for Mike Coffman. I hope his hands are clean in this.
And if I had to guess I’d say Coffman didn’t know about this. We’ll see.
….and hire highly partisan people (Tancredo is “brilliant”??), you must accept some responsibility when they turn your office into a highly partisan place.
How about I’m willing to bet that Coffman paid Kopelman for his services, database, and who knows what else he has access to.
There is no way he didn’t know when his campaign paid Political Live Wires. Not only that, don’t expect his office to actually investigate anything. You would think the State ethics group gets involved, and maybe even Auditor and AG.
Here are Coffman’s expenditures to Political Live Wires:
$150.20 04/15/2005
$1,810.15 08/09/2005
And to Kopelman directly:
$270.00 04/16/2003
$40.85 05/22/1998
$95.55 09/11/1998
$25.00 10/01/1998
$349.00 11/01/2003
$99.00 09/12/2006
$426.25 12/15/2006
$198.41 12/15/2006
(sorry for the formatting)
They apparently go back a long way together. In 1998, he was probably still hiding pictures of Ann Coulter under the mattress so his mom wouldn’t find them.
The interesting thing is that the expenditures are mostly for party supplies, office supplies, and sundries. The $1800 expenditure is for “software.” None of the expenditures are for data, research, consulting, or web design.
Apparently there aren’t a lot of others using his services, or at least paying him out of their campaign committees or (heaven forbid) reporting it, because searching expenditures yielded only one other record:
FRIENDS OF KAREN MORRIS KATALINE $50.00 08/06/2004
That, of course, doesn’t include any Tancredo expenditures in the FEC database.
There are other expenditures to Live Wire Design, Live Wire Designs, and Live Wire Networks. Unknown if they are related business names.
If anyone can add to the collection, have at it. I’d be interested to find out who else is paying him.
This info had to be pulled from the computers. Most systems for this, should have reports about who pulled what. I am sure that Coffman had to have seen these. But I would not be surprised if things will be cleaned up and made to look like he had not knowledge.
Thing is, this shows exactly why we need controls on gov. Projects like TIA need to be tightly controled or not allowed.
Voter lists are public records. If he’s buying the records, then adding value on his own time, it’s just a moonlighting issue. Moonlighting is not illegal. If, however, he’s stealing it, that would piss me off.
You think he scrupulously purchased individual data sets from the database he managed for the state, instead of just taking them? If so, there will be a record of each purchase–that’s what the SoS’ office does, among other things.
“Moonlighting is not illegal.”
I don’t know about you, but right up front in every employment agreement I’ve signed in the last twenty years is a big clause saying I can’t do something similar outside work hours, or it will result in termination. It’s commonly known as the “no moonlighting” clause, and it’s entirely standard in the industry in which I work.
What industry is that? Information technology.
First I never said I thought he purchased the data legally. I said “IF” he purchased the data legally. That ought to be easy enough to prove or disprove. I have no idea what he did, one way or another. I hope Coffman looks into it.
Second, maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life, but I’ve never been asked to sign a no-moonlighting clause. I’ve only ever signed a no-compete clause. Since the government shouldn’t be competing with private entities, I see that as a non-issue.
The only real concern I have, and it has little to do with stealing data, is whether he’s engaging in partisan political activities while he’s a state employee.
In my current job (state employee) I had to agree not to moonlight in a manner that would be substantially the same as what I do for the state.
A no-compete request would generally cover after-employment work – not to work for a competitor, although I would suppose that it might also cover moonlighting for a competitor as well.
during his campaign? If yes, then I would assume that he approved of Kopelman’s activity of selling list to Republican clients while he is employed as “Elections Technology Manager”.
You also should be able to review the SOS Voter File purchase records to determine if Kopelman is stealing the lists for his “moonlighting” clients or actually purchasing a SOS Voter File for each client.
This is a blatant conflict of interest activity for the person who is employed by the State to collect and manage the voter list during the day – and then to have a side business that provides that same list to a partisan set of clients. At a minimum the guy should be fired. Coffman should also be questioned to determined if he was aware of and approved of Kopelman’s activity.
Besides his campaign paying Kopelman directly (as campaign staff?)… In fact Coffman’s campaign DID pay Political Live Wires, so draw your own conclusions.
About 10 seconds on the SOS campaign finances site will verify the approx. $2000 paid from Coffman to PLW.
The state Democratic Party buys the information….not votes, ha ha, the information. It is then uploaded to a contracted service which provides the interface and the bandwidth for it. It’s called Colorado Voter Access Network. Anyone with any official capacity in the party can ask for access, even a lowly precinct chairman like me.
I had always presumed that the R’s have something similar, and possibly, the exact same service. As said above, it’s all open record and there are no secrets.
So, I can only conclude the following possibilitiess:
1. I was wrong and they do not have a voter database, they are too stupid.
2. They have one, but the organizations that this guy is selling to are too stupid to know that.
3. And he is just plain stupid to do something like this.
Stupid is as stupid does…or something.
All in all, pretty inexplicable.
For one thing the GOP has Voter Vault, and I assume Voter Vault has CO data from SOS in addition to tons of other databases about CO voters.
On a local level, I’m sure the state GOP has their own database.
Did it occur to you that this webpage and database sales was not legit for any GOP campaigns, but set up to cover some more questionable voter files that were culled from SOS database.
Another question that needs to be asked: Did he get different (presumably better) data than is available to other purchasers of SoS voter file information?
As part of my job, I help purchase data from the SoS not infrequently. We’ve been incredibly frustrated with certain aspects of the data, such as the statewide voter IDs (which have no relation to the voters’ county-level IDs, even though the SoS presumably has those IDs). As another example: by law, the SoS may not export full birthdates for voters, only birth years. However, birth dates are very useful for matching to other data sources, and would be of real value to an outside campaign.
If Mr. K is doing his own, special exports or using the database in a way not available to purchasing public, then I would suggest that constitutes a violation of *something* — even if he has records saying he paid for the data up front.