October 29, 2014 07:45 AM UTC

In Which Wayne Williams Makes a Complete Fool of Himself

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• by: Colorado Pols

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Broadcasting last night from Denver, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow featured GOP Secretary of State candidate Wayne Williams' interview on the FOX News Channel–hilariously, devastatingly. This is a must-watch clip of video:

We could not do a better job summing up the absurdity.

The only thing we have to add is this: Wayne Williams leads in most polls in the race to be Colorado's next Secretary of State. For Democrats, that is where the joke stops being funny. With less than a week remaining until the election, how would you capitalize on this nationally televised disaster if you were Williams' opponent? Original post follows.

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Last night, FOX News prime-time anchor Megyn Kelly finally addressed her week old on-air false allegations (above) about supposed insecurity in Colorado's election system. Last Tuesday night, Kelly told her millions of viewers that a new Colorado law allowed residents to "print ballots with their home computer," clearly implying that such a provision could be abused to commit vote fraud.

The problem with this allegation, of course, is that it isn't true in the least. Apart from overseas absentee and deployed military voters, who could print an emailed ballot and return it before last year's election modernization law, no Colorado voter can "print ballots."

As you can see in the video below, Kelly was commendably matter-of-fact correcting her false statement about Colorado election law last night. Unfortunately, she then proceeds to interview El Paso County clerk Wayne Williams, now the Republican candidate for Secretary of State in Colorado–and Williams slaughters his own credibility trying to portray mail ballots as vulnerable to fraud.

Williams bases his case against mail ballots in this interview on a truly bizarre presumption, claiming flat-out that some voters are afraid of "someone in their household, a union boss, or an employer," who may try to "intimidate" them. You've got to watch the video to appreciate how truly nutty Williams looked spouting this talk-radio nonsense. Even Megyn Kelly couldn't go along with Williams' far-fetched theory, asking why this "small sliver of the population" under intimidation or whatever would negate the better access to the franchise mail ballots provide to the vast majority voters. Kelly even asked incredulously, "who lives with their boss?" This was an amazingly bad moment for both Megyn Kelly and Wayne Williams: Kelly wasn't getting anything like a useful scandal from Williams' silly scenario of "union boss intimidation," and Williams…well, he just looks like a blathering idiot.

The questions then turn to last year's recall elections, which were the first test of the House Bill 13-1303 election reforms such as same-day registration. Again, the fraud scenario outlined by Williams is incredibly complex: if someone were to go around to different counties registering under false names, addresses, and/or Social Security numbers, there's a possibility that the system could be at least temporarily beaten. Left unsaid, but obvious even in Megyn Kelly's facial expressions is the fact that this is a prohibitively unlikely scenario. It's very difficult to imagine that anyone who would go through the trouble of all of that identity theft would use it for such a low-reward, high-risk exercise as voting.

Of course, this is the same Wayne Williams who told reporters he didn't know anything about the Citizens United campaign finance case even though it's central to the job he's running for as Secretary of State, not to mention taking an illegal campaign donation while running for the job of chief campaign finance law enforcer. So, you know, consider the source, FOX News viewers.

Bottom line: we're glad to see that Megyn Kelly corrected her blatantly false statement. If Wayne Williams was supposed to keep the "vote fraud" outrage machine ginned up, he not only failed, but delivered a huge setback–to his own reputation, and anyone else trying to make Colorado's modernized elections scandalous.