As the Rocky Mountain News reports:
The chief of staff to Secretary of State Mike Coffman is doing campaign work for Coffman’s congressional bid in an apparent breach of ethics, according to government watchdog groups.
Jacque Ponder, who oversees election workers and other divisions, handed out “Mike Coffman for Congress 2008” stickers last Saturday morning at an Arapahoe County Republican Assembly attended by more than 1,000 people, according to attendees.
Ponder and Coffman denied that her political work violates his ethics policy.
Coffman, who attended the event at West Middle School in Greenwood Village, said, “I didn’t observe her campaigning.”
Remember Coffman’s “ethics policy?” Actually, here’s the real question: remember it being quietly altered a couple of weeks later?
We don’t either:
Coffman said Ponder is not subject to his ethics policy because she works in his administration division. The policy, adopted last May, initially applied to “any employee who has direct or indirect involvement or oversight in elections, to include employees of the Elections, Administration, and IT Divisions.”
Coffman said Friday that the policy was changed about two weeks later, based on advice from the Attorney General’s office, so it no longer applied to the administration division.
Ponder supervises elections workers and projects, according to emails obtained by the Rocky Mountain News through the Colorado Open Records Act…
It’s really amazing to us that this kind of blatant abuse keeps happening at the Secretary of State’s office, over and over again, while Coffman offers one feeble excuse after another and seemingly gets away with it.
So Coffman’s high-level Elections Division staff can moonlight selling voter data to Republican clients…and that’s okay. And Phase Line Strategies can lobby Coffman’s office for the one voting machine company he didn’t reject during his inscrutable first round of tests while simultaneously running Coffman’s congressional campaign…and that’s okay. And now Coffman’s chief of staff can blatantly violate the rules Coffman hastily set up after the last partisan misuse of his office was discovered, but that’s okay because Coffman quietly changed the rules a couple of weeks later?
Seriously, folks, when is it too much to take? Never?
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Dustin Zvonek, Coffman’s campaign manager, denied that Ponder is campaigning for Coffman.
“She does not work for us (the campaign) and she does not do things that interfere with her job as Chief of Staff,” he said.
Well, hmmm…if you take Coffman Campaign Manager Zvonek at his word that the SOS Chief of Staff Ponder is not associated with the Coffman Campaign, then how could Mr. Zvonek possibly know that Ms. Ponder “does not do things that interfere with her job as Chief of Staff”…?
The only way Mr. Zvonek could make this representation is if he possesses first-hand knowledge or oversight of Ms. Ponder’s activities during the scope of her duties as Coffman’s SOS Chief of Staff – which then substantially proves the illegal ties between the two organizations.
duuuh.
z
Special rules for special people:
Forget the spirit of the law.
Forget the letter of the law.
Forget perception.
Forget conflict of interest.
For get semantics of “intent” vs.”pledge”
Forget “unintended consequences”
Forget being a special interest of one!
You mean to claim that Udall’s staffers aren’t working on his campaign? That Clinton and Obama don’t have their staffs working on their campaigns?
This is a lot of nonsense from the Dems who think lying about universal health care and NAFTA is ok.
Why wait for Coffman’s term to end? All people concerned with ethics in government should unite on this one to get a recall effort going.
Yeah that’s make alot of sense, we should state with Udall. His Cong. Staff were handing out suckers last weekend in Boulder.
Get freakin real,
you take a logical argument and make an obnoixious one. Get freaking real indeed.
Coffman is a disgrace
Udall is not the state’s top election official.
You honestly think that people would actually get behind a recall effort because an employee of the Secretary of State’s office was passing out Mike Coffman’s stickers on her own free time? Is she an Arapahoe County resident? Is she a registered Republican? If the answer is “yes” to either, isn’t she entitled to be at such a function?
There is no public election taking place at a GOP county assembly, so why is there an “ethics violation” for someone participating in the exercise of free speech at a partisan event?
The Rocky wrote a story about a person on their own time handing about campaign stickers? The horror! I guess we better round up all the capitol staff who have campaign stickers on their cars in the state government parking lots. I mean they are pushing politics on state property while they are being paid by the taxpayers!!!
Ethics Watch hurry up and file sometype of outrage we need you to stop the insanity or maybe help create it.
If so, you’re breaking and not bending…
Listen: his response was he didn’t see it. So that obviously means it didn’t happen.
End of story.
Let me get this straight. A political staffer….on a Saturday…..was handing out stickers. Huh, I guess I see the scandal. I mean, I’m sure there has never been a time in the history of politics when political staffers campaigned for their bosses on their own time. GIVE ME A BREAK. If Ponder had been doing this on a Wednesday afternoon than I could see a case being made that she was on government time, but it was SATURDAY. These partisan leftwing attack groups are so desperate they will fabricate a story out of thin air. To allege passing stickers out at a county assembly on a Saturday is somehow an ethical laps is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
But what they fail to mention is that the rules were altered because the Attorney General’s office said the guidelines were too restrictive of people’s rights to freely participate in political activities. I guess it’s better to just leave out little details like that because they have a tendency of ruining a good fictional story.
“The facts are stubborn things” – John Adams
Apparently handing out stickers on a Saturday morning violates ethics policy now… Wow, what is this country coming to? According to this ridiculous story, certain people are not allowed First Amendment rights, such as handing out stickers on your own time, aka 9 am on a Saturday. Personally, I want government to manage my time too; they should make it illegal for me to make posts on this website later than 5 pm. Oops, I just made an ethics violation. But let’s be flat out honest, what we need is another Amendment 41, because watchdog groups are always on the ball.
In the time that Mike Coffman served two terms in the Colorado House of Representatives, one in the Colorado State Senate, and two terms as Colorado State Treasurer, there was never even a whiff of scandal or impropriety. Now you want us to believe — by becoming secretary of state — he has suddenly become unethical. The public simply is not going to buy it.
Who cares about the stickers?
The point is that the Kopelman thing got him in hot water, so he issued new rules to try and salvage the credibility of his office. Then he rewrote those rules so that it suited him and his political (i.e., “administrative”) staff better…hence the COS handing out stickers.
The stickers are beside the point.
So it’s not about the stickers? Yet, the article was only about “the stickers.” I don’t understand how, with a straight face, you can tell me that the article was not about “the stickers,” it was the hook. But thankfully, voters will be able to look beyond such petty articles.
Looks to me like this entire ‘scandal’ could have been avoided by not enacting such harsh limits of what SoS employees could do on their own time. Whatever the motives, the timing of the revised rules looks bad for Coffman.
All Ponder did was choose to use her time to support a candidate of her choosing – nothing wrong with that, but, because of HIS OWN RULES, Coffman now comes out looking like the guy who limits the political speech of his employees, unless they’re speaking for him.