June 24, 2013 09:46 PM UTC

Giron Petition Declared Sufficient

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• by: Colorado Pols

Unexpected news out of Pueblo, as a press release from Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced today:

Today Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced the petition to recall Senator Angela Giron (SD-3) was found sufficient.
 
On June 10, 2013, the proponents of the recall effort submitted 13,466 petition signatures to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State's office began an immediate line-by-line review of the signatures. The proponents were required to gather 11,285 valid signatures, equaling 25 percent of all the votes cast in the previous election for Senate District 3. The total number of valid signatures on the petition was 12,648.
 
Under Colorado law, any eligible elector can file a protest with the Secretary of State within fifteen days to challenge the validity of the petitions. Barring a successful protest at the conclusion of the protest period, the Governor will be responsible for setting an election date.

We'll be the first to admit that we did not expect such an extremely high validity rate as appears to be the case with the petition effort against Sen. Angela Giron. We had heard that volunteers were cross-checking voter registrations against public voter registration data in real time with mobile technology to confirm that signers were valid residents of the district, and with this success in hand we think that should become a standard practice wherever possible. Regardless of which side you're on in the debate over gun safety legislation passed this year, you've got to hand it to recall organizers for running a tight ship. As more information becomes available–including blue-on-blue Democratic infighting relatively unknown outside Pueblo that apparently contributed to the success of this effort–we'll have more to say about what happened here.

Though again, despite the unexpectedly successful signature drive, there is a potentially fatal flaw in this recall petition. Its failure to include the request to elect a successor, as constitutionally required, could make this a lost cause.