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October 09, 2008 05:43 PM UTC

Did Colorado illegally remove voters from the rolls?

  • 57 Comments
  • by: Canines

(A looming disaster? – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Here’s a New York Times article about several swing states — including Colorado — in which voters have been removed from the rolls prior to the election. The Times is questioning the legality of the actions in Colorado.

Mike Coffman’s comment? No comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10…

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.

Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately. The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states – Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina – could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.

The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

In three states – Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan – the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.

States may be improperly removing voters who have moved within the state, election experts said, or who are considered inactive because they have failed to vote in two consecutive federal elections. For example, major voter registration drives have been held this year in Colorado, which has also had a significant population increase since the last presidential election, but the state has recorded a net loss of nearly 100,000 voters from its rolls since 2004.

In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,100 people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records.

The secretaries of state in Michigan and Colorado did not respond to requests for comment.

Disturbing business.

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57 thoughts on “Did Colorado illegally remove voters from the rolls?”

  1. Who submits the voter lists? Is there a master list showing the voters who haven’t voted in the last two federal elections, or do the county clerks keep the lists and then submit them to the SOS?

    What I’m getting at – is it the clerks or the SOS who determine which voters are purged?

      1. The clerks keep their own lists, purge the lists of inactive voters and then submit those lists to the SOS.

        But the lists from ProjectVote were voters who submitted applications with errors so they weren’t registered.  IIRC, those weren’t purged voters.

  2. They are admitting fraud in several states.

    They don’t turn in registrations for anyone filling out a form for Republicans.  And, they are busing homeless people all over the city to register in multiple locations.

    Some people have registered to vote 17 times.

    The proper response is to throw all the ACORN registrants out.

    1. For those eager to point fingers at ACORN…

      ACORN is very confused about the raid of their office in NV right now, because it is ACORN who notified officials – at the time they submitted the voter registrations – of the irregularities with those registrations.

      By law, ACORN (and anyone else collecting voter registrations) is required to submit to elections officials every single registration they receive.  They cannot “weed out” the ones they determine to be bad – think about the abuse that would allow.  Instead, they flag suspicious registrations for elections officials to deal with.  If one of their workers is suspected of misdeeds, the worker is fired and ACORN contacts election and law enforcement officials.  This is the most they can legally do to prevent registration fraud.

      (I am not affiliated with ACORN in any way; the points above are supported by the paperwork, the law, and by ACORN’s policies and actions.)

  4. This should be front-page, banner-headline news. And the Secretary of State’s office is refusing to comment? Scandal.

    Colorado voter rolls have been REDUCED by 100,000 despite all the voter registration drives that have been going on?

    And there’s been massive, widespread violation of a simple federal law that should be one of the Ten Commandments for any clerk or election official: you can’t remove voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election?

    Shocking.

    Not to mention Secretary of State Coffman’s rejection of many thousands of voter registrations based on the voter not checking a specific box that isn’t even required by any state law, as previously reported at ColoradoPols and elsewhere.

    Let’s just call Mike Coffman “Katherine Blackwell” from now on. Shame!

    1. This sort of thing is one of the reasons why the Obama campaign’s massive voteforchange.com database is so important — you can see your registration status and fix problems before Election Day.

      I urge everybody to double-check their status, just to make sure Mike Coffman doesn’t think you’re dead.

      1. If there were problems with your registration paperwork – such as you didn’t check the right box, etc. – you will still be allowed to cast a provisional ballot if it’s not cleared up by election time?

        And will your provisional ballot count if it can be confirmed that you are in fact a real live citizen entitled to vote?

        Or if you didn’t check that box – as apparently happened to THOUSANDS due to criminally incorrect instructions from the Secretary of State’s office – and the registration deadline has expired, have you been robbed of your right to vote in the election at all?

      2. I don’t know how it was compiled or how often it’s updated, but it’s got a lot of errors.

        Our local elections division has gotten hundreds of calls from panicky people who show up in there as not registered.  Most actually are registered.  Also, many duplicate registrations showing up from people who thought they weren’t registered.

        No big deal, except it’s costing the taxpayers a bloody fortune to sort it our.

      3. I’m a Denver resident but live in an Englewood zip code so it’s telling me to go vote at the Englewood Civic Center. I emailed them to get that fixed ’cause that’s bad.

        I recall hearing about some residents of a section of unincorporated Arapaho County that’s surrounded by Denver (near Yale and Monaco) who were told to vote at one of the Voting Centers in 2006, only to be told they were in the wrong place after they had spent hours in line. GOTV efforts need to be aware of weird jurisdiction stuff like that.  

        1. which establishes the judiciary.

          P.S., if the court had not stepped in, the legislature, which was in session and had both houses controlled by Republicans would have awarded Florida’s electoral votes to Bush.  They have that power under article II, which states “Each state shall appoint, in such mannere as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.

          Game, set and match.  

          Incidentally, the SCOTUS ruling that threw out the 4-3 Florida Court decision that tried to gived the electoral votes to Gore was overturned 7-2. It was only on crafting a remedy that they split 5-4.

          Personally, I wish the SCOTUS had stuck with the 7-2 vote, and tossed the issue back to the Florida legislature. The result would have been the same but the court would have been  more united and less subject to partisan assault.

           

          1. That was wrong!  Gore should have been the president.

            But, ACORN is going about this all wrong too.  Our electoral process is being over run with dishonest people.

            Election fraud under Obama is just as wrong.

            Two wrongs don’t make a right (But 2 wrongs do make a Rev. Wright).

                1. to defend the U.S. Constitution, Nancy.  That’s what clouds my judgment and always will.  If you don’t like the constitution, there are ways to change it but I’ll stick with it and you should at least respect it.

            2. Ms. Baldwin you’d seem to be the sort of person who’d make someone like me wish abortion were more pervasive.Even then you’d seem to be proof that we’ll never get all the stoopid weeded out.You’d also think that somewhere along the line the wonderful DOJ under first Ashcroft then Gonzales, then Mukasey would have instituted an investigation into the alleged ACORN misdeeds.Perhaps some of those dismissed U.S. Attorneys might have turned something up.

              Basically this is just cover for the wingnuts who’ll wish to scream foul as they’re swept away by the wave of revulsion unleashed by the busheviks.

                1. No matter how much you disagree with someone, that kind of comment is just out of line.  Thats just despicable.  If you don’t feel horrible before or after typing something like that, well, I guess that says something.

                  1. themonk77 is not glad that you aborted your children.

                    He wishes he had more idiots standing by his side and fighting the good fight of censorship.

  7. I’ve been hearing about shenanigans coming out of the SoS office from on-the-ground sources for a while now. Not in terms of purging the rolls but in terms of not accepting new registrations for bizarre reasons. I’ve been surprised to not see more fuzz about it on Pols.

    Obviously this is system corruption.  We can’t blame Coffman for “abusing” the power we gave him to abuse.  The position overseeing these questions shouldn’t be elected.

  9. 1. Colorado does not purge voters for missing elections and has not for over a decade. If a voter misses a general eelction (any general, not just presidential) they are marked “inactive”. This keeps them registered and if they show up to vote, they will be able to, but they will not get mailings from election officials such as the blue book etc. The major downside is they will also not get a ballot in an all-mail ballot election. I suspect there will be legislation in 2009 to address this last point.

    2. There had been purging going one before 2007, before the statewide voter registrations sytem (SCORE) went into effect, but it was based on people moving from one county to another. They would be purged from the county they left. This was the standard procedure when each county managed their own voter file and then submitted to the SoS.

    3. Colorado DOES have a problem that I have discussed before but is not covered by the NYT article and seems fairly specific to Colorado. See my thread on “SOS Disenfranchising New Voters”

    4. to answer one of the questions I saw, prior to mid-2007 counties managed their own databaase and submitted to the SoS periodically, and in different ways. In mid-2007 the SCORE system came on-line and changes to a voter record in any county are now accessible by any other county as well as the SoS’s office, so changes are immediate and there is no longer need to wait for submissions from counties.

    Hope this helps

    1. Yes, they are purging voters based on not voting.  That is what the major purge was about earlier this year.

      Recall the conversation I had with someone else here about Gilpin’s supposed lack of voter interest – and I noted 250+ people who were no longer contactable and inactive to boot?  Those 250+ people got purged.  Considering how bad having inaccurate voter rolls made the county look, I’m quite fine with that part.

      The parts that bother me are the less-than-90-day cancellations and the recent stunt to reject voter registrations that aren’t 100% dotted-i, crossed-t correct.

    2. Apparently a change to Colorado law we made a decade or so ago totally forbidding purging was superceded by more recent laws and I did nto realize it.

      We are indeed allowed to purge people from a voter roll, but only if they have missed two consecutive presidential elections and every election in between. That means the last time a LEGAL purge happened in Colorado would have been in the early part of 2005. Theorectically, I suppose counties could continue to purge people as they find them who have not voted since before Nov 2000. However, they are barred by federal law from purging anyone in the 90 day period before a general election, except for people who have died been convicted of felonies.

      According to what I saw on the news last night (haven’t looked at the paper yet this morning), apparently purging was going on as recently as last month. This is something the SoS or County Clerks involved should be held accountable for.

      Now that we have a statewide voter reg system, there is no excuse to purge non-voters since they are likely to show up ahain in another county. The only people we should be purging after this election are people who have not voted at anytime (including municipal elections) anywhere in Colorado since before Nov. 2004; people who have died; people who have been convicted of felonies; and people who we have documentation they have moved out of state (ie – notice from the voting officials of the other state. Some state provide this, some don’t).

      For what it is worth, I asked the Dir. of Elections for Denver and have been told Denver has not purged anyone for not voting since before 2004.  

      1. Some counties (perhaps large portions of the state) had not performed the purge prior to this year.  Hence the drastic changes in some voter rolls.

        While theoretically these purges could have been done sooner (as you note, 2005), there was a big deal made about the major voter purge done around June of this year, back when it happened and shortly thereafter.  I believe this is just catch-up work for not having it done before.

        Thanks for the check in Denver, BTW.  Interesting to know that it isn’t uniform.

  10. Coffman is blaming the Times for leaving a message that didn’t make its way to the right elections official for comment. You know, how the Times reporters will just call up and leave a voice mail without follow-up before running a major story accusing officials of disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. Yeah.

    If his office had gotten the request for comment, Coffman explained, there would have been no story.

    We’ll see.

    1. I mean, it’s not like Republicans haven’t done something underhanded or illegal to disenfranchise thousands of voters before.

      Mike Coffman = giant shitbag.

  11. You have been around elections too long not to know that voters can be cancelled (purged) from the voter registration lists if they fail to vote.  This is Elections 101 stuff.  If a voter misses one general election, they are moved to the inactive list.  If they miss two more general elections after that (three total), they are cancelled (purged).  It’s all in Title 1, Article 2.  

    This law should not be changed, despite what Common Cause and Sen. Gordon may think.  In counties like Denver, where the population is so transient, it is important to start people who have may have moved without notifying the Elections Divison towards being cancelled.  This is especially important in a Mail Ballot Election.  With Denver’s large inactive list, if ballots were mailed to inactive voters, think of all the ballots that would be sent to addresses where voters no longer lived.  It increases the likelihood of fraud.  Any contact at all with the county elections office can reactivate a voter.  The law is fine as it is now.  

    1. But voters shouldn’t be purged within 90 days of the election.

      There are legally prescribed times to purge voters.

      If you know the half of the law that you cited, you certainly know the rest.

  12. I checked multiple time in the days leading up to the cutoff via the SoS site, and I was always on. Check today after this article and I no longer appear.

    I accept that there might have been a hiccup when I checked the three times today, and admittedly I missed the 2006 election due to law school, but what recourse do I have hear? Am I totally screwed?

    1. Over at Square State, there’s a notice from the state Democrats. It sounds like contacting your county clerk would be the first step, if indeed you don’t show again tomorrow (the system could have been strained today). If indeed you were removed for missing an election, it certainly shouldn’t have happened today. You’re also not removed for missing a single election, and I believe there’s a postcard attempt to allow inactive voters to let the clerk know you wish to remain on the rolls.

      Registrants may visit the Secretary of State’s website, http://www.sos.state.co.us/, to confirm their voter registration information by entering their first name, last name, zip code and date of birth.  Newly registered voters can visit the County Clerk’s office nearest to them or to call the Secretary of State at 303-894-2200 to inquire about their registration status.

      While at the County Clerk’s office, voters are encouraged to request, in-person, a vote-by-mail ballot to ensure that they are not forced to cast a provisional ballot, and to avoid any unsuspected inconveniences on Election Day.

      Mail-in ballots may be returned by hand to the Clerk’s office or to a vote center within the county in which the voter is registered, or via postal mail.  Voters should be advised to include sufficient postage.

      Concerned voters are also encouraged to contact their local Democratic campaign office for additional assistance by calling 1-877 CO’08-VOTE (1-877-260-8868)

      1. By going directly to the SoS website and nothing. Called the Arapahoe County Clerk who said I was good, and the person I talked to suggested I connect through their website, which I did and then I appeared.

        A coworker did the same thing I did after she wasnt on the SoS page, and got the same result after she cotacted her county clerk and checked through their site.

        It might have been too much traffic, but when the red lettering was at the top of the page yesterday and today saying their was no matching info, well, that was a little scary and ridiculously infuriating.

        2. They just haven’t gotten your record into the SOS master file yet.

          A friend of mine registered on June 23rd using the Rock the Vote national form which instructs you to send it to the Secretary of State. The SOS then sends it to the county clerk, the clerk does the entry, and sends the data back to the SOS. That process took about 4 months, as he didn’t show up on the SOS site until about a week ago.

          1. My registration was from when I turned 18 (27 now) at the DMV. What threw me was that I was on, then I was off, now I am on again. I am sure I am fine since the clerk says I am in the file.

            I curse my paranoia for checking compulsively leading up to the deadline then checking compulsively after this article.  

              1. Each time it said there was no record I would reenter the information. The first time I checked I thought it was odd that slashes were required.

                I really think it boils down to the site being overwhelmed, or at least I hope thats what the problem was.

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